Reconfiguring the SDGs for Philippine Businesses: A Case Study

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or the Global Goals, are composed of seventeen (17) Goals with interrelated targets. With its ability to create sustainable, innovative and scalable market solutions, to address the world’s problems, the business sector plays a critical role in the achievement of the SDGs. The intertwining nature of the goals though can make measuring business contributions to the SDGs confusing especially if we strictly stick to the 17-goal format. With this as a starting point, three institutions, namely the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Philippine Business for the Environment (PBE) and the Ateneo de Manila University, worked on making the SDGs more relatable to Philippine businesses. This was done by reviewing SDG-related reporting frameworks, consulting a wide range of stakeholders from the academe and the private sector, and reorganizing the Global Goals into categories or Topics that are easily understandable to Philippine businesses. The result of this process is a simplified framework we call the “SDG Ecosystem.” This framework is then supported by a guidance document, a reporting template and a company dashboard that contains and presents the development indictors and metrics for each of the topics on the SDG Ecosystem. Using this framework and the related documents, it is hoped that Philippine businesses will find it easier to report their contribution to the Global Goals and see how their contribution to one category or Topic would have an impact to the whole system and even to multiple Global Goals.