Paul Polman — FE photo Business entities in Bangladesh and around the world need to integrate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their overall strategy, a leading global business leader has said.
SDG is probably the best business agenda right now to bring long term success, according to Paul Polman, who is the global Chairman of International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).
"SDG has 17 goals and 169 targets. And about two-thirds of those targets cannot be achieved without the private sector," Mr Polman, who was in Dhaka this week, told the FE in an exclusive interview on Monday.
"The implementation of SDGs globally is going to cost us 3.0 to 5.0 trillion dollars, which is not much for the global economy," Polman, who is the the global CEO of Unilever, noted.
"Governments themselves do not have that much money to spend. So, you need to get the private sector actively involved," he added.
"Private sector in most countries is half of the GDP, 80 pc of the financial flow and 90 pc of the job creation," Mr Polman said. "So, businesses first and foremost need to be aware about SDGs and they need to integrate those into their overall strategy or sustainability strategy."
"And they can also apply it into their value chain, which obviously has a bigger impact," he added.
"If you want to unlock your economy, you have to really follow the path of implementing the SDGs," said Mr Polman, who has been closely involved in global discussions on action to tackle climate change and the Post-2015 development agenda.
The ICC chief also heaped praise on Bangladesh's recent economic progress.
"In the last few years, Bangladesh continues to be one of the better performing countries in the world. We have seen great progress by Bangladesh in achieving some of the goals in the global development agenda," he said.
"However, the country needs to attract more foreign direct investment to provide that stronger base to grow for the longer term," he observed.
The story of Bangladesh's growth also needs to be better focused on the global stage, Mr Polman said.
There are also areas where the country needs to further develop, he said, citing rule of law, access to legal systems, and corruption control as examples.
"Significant improvement in these areas tends to create more FDI opportunities," the ICC chairman said.
Mr Polman also identified climate change and income inequality as two major challenges faced by the world right now.
"Climate change and income inequality are two of the areas that are damaging the long term successful growth of any country. So, the businesses need to focus on these as priorities," he said.
The ICC chairman argued that despite "the rise of populism in some countries that are challenging the global rules-based system, global trade continues to blossom and continues to be the strong backbone of the global economy."
"Over and over, it has been proven that wealth gets created if we have an open rules-based trading system".
"Globalisation has lifted a lot of people out of poverty over the last few decades and Bangladesh has benefitted from that as well," Mr Polman said.
"But now many people have questions that benefit of that globalisation is not fairly distributed and too many people are under the impression that globalisation has not been to their benefit", he added.
"So we need to make sure that we not only protect globalisation but we also need to make sure that more people feel that they benefit from globalization," Mr Polman said.
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