Rebuild

Growth and productivity alone are not enough, without addressing inequality and the environment. There is a need to shift policies so that economies make sustainability and social inclusion central to how they function,” she continued.

Antswisa is mobilizing African and global leaders to work together to achieve a more inclusive, cohesive and sustainable future as soon as possible. 

The board’s role in embedding corporate purpose: Five actions directors can take today

A large spotlight is shining on corporate actions these days, and all stakeholders have growing expectations. A board’s involvement in defining purpose helps meet those expectations.

Multiple forces have increased attention on stake­holder capitalism, and most boards have not sufficiently grappled with the significant implications for their organizations. Last year, Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs who run major US corporations, committed member companies to serving the interests of all stakeholders, but their signatories have found it challenging to deliver fully on their promise. While 181 chief executives signed the roundtable’s statement, only one did so with board approval.1 Could boards have used this moment to engage more deeply with manage­ment teams to embed corporate purpose within their organizations—a role that fits squarely within a board’s obligation to enhance the company’s long-term performance?

The future of fashion: Sustainable brands and ‘circular’ business models

There’s no denying that the fashion industry has been a major contributor to climate change and biodiversity loss—which means the industry’s sustainability efforts are critical to our planet’s health. In this edition, The Next Normal explores the coming decade in sustainable fashion

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are critical for the economic and social development of emerging markets. These businesses generate income and create the majority of jobs—between 70 and 95 percent of new employment opportunities—in emerging economies. SMEs are more likely to generate jobs, and at a faster pace, when they have access to finance.

Yet access to financial services for SMEs remains severely constrained in many developing countries, restricting business growth. Owners and entrepreneurs report access to capital to be one of their toughest challenges, one that sometimes outranks electricity shortages and other concerns. 

The nation’s ability to prosper and to thrive in an increasingly knowledge-based global society and economy depends on our having a progressively well-educated population. The values and practices of pure research—discovery, originality, innovation—shape and motivate African university learning.

Landscape stewardship offers a means to put social-ecological approaches to stewardship into practice. The growing interest in landscape stewardship has led to a focus on multistakeholder collaboration. We identified five overarching factors that influence collaboration: contextual, institutional, social-relational, individual, and political-historical. Collaborative stewardship approaches focused on the development of formal governance institutions appear to be most successful if enabling individual and social-relational conditions are in place. Moreover, we propose a bottom-up patchwork approach to collaborative stewardship premised on the notion of pluralism. This would focus on building new interpersonal relationships and collaborative capacity through small collective actions.

The notion of stewardship has recently received renewed attention in response to rising concerns about social-ecological sustainability challenges. This is evidenced in the rapid growth in work conceptualizing stewardship, especially in the social-ecological systems and resilience literature, in which stewardship is framed as a necessary response of humanity in an era of rapid environmental change.

Multifunctional landscapes provide a suitable place-based unit for addressing complex sustainability concerns including stewardship. Multifunctional landscapes are landscapes that provide a diversity of ecosystem functions or services that underpin social and economic functioning for a range of beneficiaries or landscape stakeholders.

We have a unique opportunity to harness this Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the societal shifts it triggers, to help address environmental issues and redesign how we manage our shared global environment. The Fourth Industrial Revolution could, however, also exacerbate existing threats to environmental security or create entirely new risks that will need to be considered and managed.

Harnessing these opportunities and proactively managing these risks will require a transformation of the “enabling environment”, namely the governance frameworks and policy protocols, investment and financing models, the prevailing incentives for technology development, and the nature of societal engagement. This transformation will not happen automatically. It will require proactive collaboration between policy­makers, scientists, civil society, technology champions and investors.

The AfCFTA Secretariat and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) have signed a strategic partnership to promote trade as a stimulus for Africa’s socioeconomic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, and as a driver of sustainable development particularly for women and youth in Africa, in line with the SDGs and Agenda 2063, Africas’ development blue print.

“The AfCFTA is beyond a trade liberalizing instrument. It is an enabler of inclusive growth and sustainable development,”

Production, The export impact of special economic Zones and local production, the growing calls for Circular Economy to be placed at the heart of manufacturing and industrial production and the economic stability as tools to attract a greater share of foreign investments to unlock the development potential in these African countries.

African countries must reduce their excessive dependency on raw material exports and imported consumer goods, as the only viable way to reduce poverty and social inequality on the continent. Material production embedded with Circular Economy is solution for Inclusive Growth and Structural Transformation for Poverty Reduction in Africa.

Global materials use is projected to more than double from 95 Gt in 2020 to 170 Gt in 2060. Non-metallic minerals, such as sand, gravel and limestone, represent more than half of total materials use. … Recycling is projected to become more competitive compared to the extraction of primary materials.