SDG Washing ➡ Align SDG Goals, SDG Targets, SDG Indicators

SDG Goals, SDG Target, SDG Indicators * SDG Washing * Impact Washing * Sustainable Development Goals * SDG Training:

Are you a business with the vision to drive social impact through Sustainable Development Goals? Are you concerned about potentially over claiming SDG impact? More than 190 world leaders committed to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (or SDG Goals 2030). Achieving the Global Goals opens up an economic prize of $12 trillion by 2030. And a recent study reports that 40 percent of the world’s 250 largest companies discuss Sustainable Development Goals in the context of their business strategy. This is potentially good news, but unfortunately, there are still significant gaps between reporting and action.

In our upcoming videos, we will show you how to collect stakeholder data to demonstrate relevant outcomes in connection to Sustainable Development Goals and the Impact Management Project. So don’t forget to smash that like button, subscribe, and click that notification bell, so you don’t miss any of the upcoming content we have planned for you.

Without further ado, let’s jump into today’s topic.

What is SDG washing? There are two ways to define it:
- One situation occurs When companies are making a profit by doing well on one SDG but are concurrently doing harm on other SDGs.
- The other involves businesses who talk about their commitment to SDGs, yet don’t have any data to back the impact reports. In other words, they’re all bark and no bite...

I know that as a socially-conscious company, the last thing you want to do is fall in this SDG-washing category. So here are some tips to avoid falling in the trap:
Align your indicators to SDG targets and not just SDG Goals
Everyone knows that there are 17 Global Goals, but did you know that the UN has also defined 169 SDG targets that give us a clear guideline on the impact and context for each Goal?

For example, goal 4, “Quality Education,” has 10 targets. Target 4.3, as an example, talks about ensuring equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational, and tertiary education, including university. So if you have a program with a high-quality education, but it’s not “affordable,” according to your community and context, you can’t really claim that you align to SDG 4.

Let me give you another example. Your organization has a program focused on educating students from an underserved community, and you want to report alignment to SDG 1 “No Poverty.” Your assumption is that by providing job-related skills to your students, they will find a job and, thus, reduce their level of poverty.

So What do you do next to make sure you’re measuring what matters in terms of SDGs? You guessed it! Let’s first examine the list of targets for SDG 1 to understand what poverty reduction means. Target 1.1 talks about eradicating extreme poverty, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day.

First, make sure to know what the poverty level is in the community that you are working with; is it $1.25 a day? Has the data been updated recently?
Second, make sure to collect data that indicates how much money your beneficiaries are making in their new job. If their salary doesn’t go above the poverty line, it doesn’t matter that they have a new job; the specific target is not being fulfilled.

Measure and report on the actual outcomes, not just the activities
If we go back to our previous example, reporting on activities would mean tracking the number of people enrolled in your program, or the graduation rate. While these numbers are essential to monitoring your program’s performance, it is more important to understand how the skills learned in your plan are useful to the participants in their current jobs. Or how having this additional training improves the participants' chances to get a job that satisfies them.

Measure unintended and negative outcomes too

The purpose of impact measurement is to identify what we are doing right and what we should improve. You don’t intend to affect your stakeholders in any way, but sometimes it could happen without you noticing.

For example, you could be focusing on providing skills and tools for a community to subsist on fishing. Maybe your community members are using the fish to feed their families, which is excellent for SDG Zero Hunger. Perhaps they are even making good money by selling the fish to other communities, which helps SDG No Poverty. But if you are not careful, you could end up affecting SDG Land underwater, which has a target focused on ending overfishing and implementing plans to restore fish stocks.


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