ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS, OR MAXIMIZING THEIR SOCIAL IMPACTS?
7.6 ARE ENTREPRENEURS AWARE OF THE UNITED NATIONS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDG S )?
Chapter 1 briefly outlined the UN SDGs and suggested that they were becoming more influential in the business environment, including among entrepreneurs. The previous
section showed that a majority of both new and established entrepreneurs are taking steps to change their social and environmental impacts:
doing so would be in support of the SDGs
FIGURE 7.6 The share of new and established business owners who have taken steps in the past year to maximize the social impact of their business (% Total early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity [TEA] and % Established Business Ownership [EBO]) Source: GEM Adult Population Survey 2023
% of TEA/EBO
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
India Iran Colombia Morocco Ecuador Jordan Venezuela Guatemala Mexico South Africa Thailand China Brazil Estonia Latvia Lithuania Slovak Republic Spain Hungary Cyprus Israel Oman Uruguay Greece Poland Chile Romania Croatia Puerto Rico Panama France Norway Republic of Korea Slovenia United Kingdom Sweden Netherlands United States Italy Qatar Switzerland Germany Luxembourg Canada Saudi Arabia
Total early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) Established Business Ownership (EBO)
Level B
Level C Level A
Yvette Ishimwe (Rwanda)
Cartier Women’s Initiative 2023 Fellow
Empowering communities with clean water: an entrepreneur addressing UN SDG Goal #6
Yvette Ishimwe is one of many entrepreneurs who are addressing society’s big challenges, like those encapsulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
SDG Goal #6 is about clean water and sanitation:
a challenging area. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, 320 million people lack access to this basic right; only 57% of the Rwandan population can find potable water within 30 minutes of home, according to UNICEF; and children lose 443 million school days each year because of water-related illnesses.
Yvette experienced this problem first-hand when her family relocated from Rwanda’s capital city Kigali to a rural village.
“There was no water for home use or even for drinking. Water was expensive and it was difficult to get clean water.”
She found that her family could hire a truck to pump water from a nearby lake to their home, and purify it with a $400 kit. She explains:
“My mom gave me the money. They installed it on our water tank. Then the neighbours started to come. After three days, our compound was full of people coming in to fetch water from our home.”
While at university she was awarded $10,000 through a business competition to implement the solution she’d found for her family on a wider scale.
The village could now build a solar-powered plant to pump water from a natural spring.
This led to Ishimwe launching Iriba Water Group, a social enterprise that tackles the problem of drinking water scarcity in Rwanda and other
low-income African countries. The company’s Tap &
Drink systems, installed in public places like markets, parking lots and schools, connect to and purify municipal tap water. The public can access water with a “water ATM card” and Iriba tracks usage with a software management system. Franchisees run the systems, complementing the company’s core mission by providing local jobs.
Since 2017, the company’s 74 Tap & Drink systems have brought safe, affordable water to over 300,000 people in Rwanda and eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it is now replicating the model in Central African Republic. Along the way, it has created 68 jobs and prevents 62 metric tons of CO2 emissions every month. In the next five years, the company plans to reach 2,750,000 people with affordable safe drinking water, create 685 jobs, and reduce emissions by a million metric tons monthly.
These numbers represent real human impact.
Incidences of water-related illnesses such as typhoid and diarrhoea have fallen dramatically in schools, directly translating to fewer school days missed.
Ishimwe concluded:
“No one should have to die or get sick for a lack of something so basic and so achievable as safe water. I believe that water is life, and life is a human right. The need is huge and abundant. We’re just getting started.”
HUMAN FACES BEHIND THE DATA . . .
Thank you to the Cartier Women’s Initiative, one of our report sponsors, for providing this material and helping to put our data in a real-world context.
(especially SDGs 9, 11 and 12).27 But the question must still be asked: are entrepreneurs aware of the SDGs and, if so, is this awareness changing over time? Is there evidence to support the notion that the SDGs are becoming more influential in the entrepreneurial world?
The GEM APS asks both new and established entrepreneurs if they are aware of the UN SDGs.
This is an optional question and not asked by all National Teams. For those that did, results for 2023 are shown in Figure 7.7.
Awareness of the SDGs was patchy at best, reaching one in two or more new entrepreneurs in Norway, and one in two Established Business Owners in Poland, Norway and China. Across the 33 economies where this question was asked in 2023, less than one in five new entrepreneurs were aware of the SDGs in 10 economies (all income levels), compared to less than one in five Established Business Owners in 12 economies. The highest levels of awareness were in Norway (TEA
59%, EBO 55%), Poland (TEA 47%, EBO 67%) and in China (TEA 37%, EBO 53%). The chart shows awareness of the SDGs typically increasing with income, and lowest in Level C Morocco, Ecuador and Jordan.
So there is little evidence that awareness of the SDGs is widespread among entrepreneurs. But are there signs that this awareness is increasing?
There are just 20 economies where this question was asked in each of the last three years. These include seven economies in which the proportion of new entrepreneurs who were aware of the SDGs increased each year.28 However, there were also eight economies in which awareness was lower in 2023 than in 2021.29 Finally, there are 11 economies in which the level of awareness among new entrepreneurs either fell and then increased or increased and then fell. A very mixed picture indeed, and no support for the notion that entrepreneurial awareness of SDGs is increasing.
FIGURE 7.7 Are you aware of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?
(% Total early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity [TEA] and % Established Business Ownership [EBO]) Source: GEM Adult Population Survey 2023
% of TEA/EBO
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Morocco Ecuador Jordan India Colombia Mexico South Africa China Thailand Cyprus Uruguay Romania Estonia Chile Slovak Republic Israel Croatia Hungary Greece Latvia Lithuania Spain Poland Qatar Slovenia Republic of Korea Canada Switzerland France Netherlands Luxembourg Italy Norway
Total early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) Established Business Ownership (EBO)
Level B
Level C Level A
27 The full list of the UN SDGs can be found in Figure 1.1 on p. 26.
28 Chile, Cyprus, Hungary, Latvia, Poland and Spain.
29 Colombia, India, Morocco, Croatia, Romania and Uruguay.