The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals offer a framework for profound, positive change. After years of negotiations among 193 countries, in September 2015 the UN issued 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seeking action on a range of fronts—ending poverty, ensuring access to clean water and sanitation, expanding availability of quality education, combating climate change, and more—with an eye toward achieving them by 2030. SDGs seek to draw in everyone from the governments of developed and developing countries to private-sector businesses to the general public, aiming to lift up our global citizenry, foster thoughtful growth, and tackle our world’s most pressing issues.

The points of overlap and alignment between the SDGs and the green building sector are familiar to anyone acquainted with the benefits of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), from furthering clean energy and reduced water consumption to resilient infrastructure and an overall ethos intended to minimize our adverse effects on the planet. “Just getting people to pay attention to the material they’re buying, where it came from, who’s involved in mining those materials—that overall life cycle approach is a core tenet of our system, and that’s really the thinking that’s behind these sustainable development goals,” says Elizabeth Beardsley, senior policy counsel for the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). “It’s also about connecting better with people and creating more opportunity for everyone to have a higher quality of life. And our mission at USGBC focuses on community, people, and support for taking action through tools, sharing best practices, and recognizing leadership performance, and those things translate in different contexts and settings.”

Beginning in this issue and lasting through 2018, USGBC+ takes a closer look at member company efforts toward achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—undertakings as thoughtful as they are impactful. “These aren’t always things you’d think of for-profit companies doing, but they all have impressive commitments and are backing them up with action,” Beardsley says. “We understand that the SDGs are helping them invest toward areas that can support achievement, to tell their story in a way that resonates, and to hopefully create opportunities for others to follow.”

Sustainable development goal 8

Sustainable Development Goal 8 promotes sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth; full and productive employment; and decent work for all. The UN has identified 10 specific targets under this goal. Taken together, the targets reflect the integrated nature of the Sustainable Development Goals, with some targets focused on economic activities, others on workers. For example, targets focused on supporting and protecting individuals include providing safe and secure working environments, eradicating forced labor, as well as ending modern slavery and human trafficking and child labor. Economic targets include achieving full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, providing equal pay for work of equal value; promoting development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation; as well as achieving targets for economic productivity and global resource efficiency.

MARS & economic growth

It’s only natural that MARS—best known as the candy maker behind Snickers, 3 Musketeers, and other confections—would source raw materials from West Africa, a region abundant with cocoa crops. But in recent years, as the company took a closer look at its supply chain, it saw a critical situation within its workforce: Women, who represent more than 40 percent of the region’s cocoa farmers and are vital to the industry, weren’t receiving the support they needed to thrive. It was an ethical and economic conundrum: a gender bias-driven lack of access to plants and fertilizers, to loans and financing, and to training in technical and life skills saw female farmers’ crop yields total up to 30 percent lower than men’s.

“In many cases, particularly with small family farms, [women] are often unpaid,” says Lisa Manley, MARS’s senior director of sustainability engagement and partnerships. “And in many places they have no access to land rights. Those are dynamics that aren’t empowering.”

In response, MARS started the Women’s Empowerment Plan, a multipronged program intended to chip away at gender discrimination wherever MARS has a presence, largely in Côte d’Ivoire (otherwise known as the Ivory Coast). Progress has been made toward Sustainable Development Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth. By working with humanitarian organizations, the plan affords women access to technical skills, economic opportunities, and other resources proven to advance their independence and social standing alongside better harvests.

“When we look specifically at women in the supply chain, they’re not benefitting from the training or access to resources that male farmers are benefiting from,” Manley says. “It’s not fair, and for a company like ours that’s really focused on principle-based leadership, it’s not going to help build the resiliency and strength that we need in our supply chain for our business to continue to thrive.”

“No one company or one industry can solve these issues, but we’ve all got a role to play.”Lisa Manley is the senior director of sustainability engagement and partnerships for MARS.

MARS is addressing several Sustainable Development Goals—including tackling poverty, climate change, and good health and well-being—through a variety of initiatives. Last September, the company launched Sustainable in a Generation, a $1 billion, science-driven effort to reduce their environmental impacts and better the lives of roughly 1 million of its people throughout the supply chain. And while MARS has assisted agricultural workers through actions like the Sustainable Cocoa Initiative, the particular plight of female farmers warrants special attention. “Whether it’s in our workplaces or marketplaces or supply chains, we’re focused on increasing income, respecting human rights, and unlocking opportunities for women,” Manley says.

Launched in 2015 in conjunction with partner organizations like CARE International, a humanitarian NGO, the Women’s Empowerment Plan revolves around two different programs. Farmer Field Schools, located in some 166 communities around Côte d’Ivoire and elsewhere, providing training in best practices for vegetable and cocoa farming, financial literacy, and marketing. “We’re helping them understand the basics—how to plant, where to plant, growing seeds, using fertilizers—of good farming practices,” Manley says. “On the economic side, we’re trying to help them understand the importance of making investments back into their farming activities, and in some cases giving them resources to help with those investments.”

Additionally, village savings and loans associations (VSLAs), a type of microfinancing mechanism, were first established by CARE in the 1990s. The organizations have established VSLAs around Côte d’Ivoire, making funds available to some 4,000 farmers, both men and women. “Oftentimes we start these programs and we see no history of savings, no history of active finance, high rates of illiteracy, and a high aversion to financial risk,” Manley says. (Meanwhile, research from MARS and other organizations shows women are more conscientious spenders, who are more inclined than men to reinvest their dollars into their families and in endeavors that benefit their communities.)

MARS invests in increasing farmer income as an estimated 200 million smallholder farmers are producing food within the world’s supply chains and far too many of them live in poverty. MARS Sustainable Sourcing program is focused on mapping key supply chains to better understand where we source products, understanding the nature of the supply chains and seeking to understand the relevant sustainability impacts.

Within a year, fortunes change. With 4,465 members enrolled in the MARS & CARE VSLA program at the end of 2017—80 percent of whom were women—average savings per member grew to $152, which marks a 58 percent increase. The loans and savings are paths to generating even more income: Manley recalls hearing of a 31-year-old mother of five who used a $70 loan to buy seedlings and plants to establish a hectare of cocoa. Another, she says, used VSLA funds to start up a fish-selling business.

Women provide two thirds of the world’s working hours and produce half of the world’s food, they earn only 10 percent of the world’s income, and own less than 1 percent of the world’s property. MARS’ goal is to unlock opportunities for women in workplaces, marketplaces, and supply chains.

“We’re finding that the people participating in the program feel more connected not just with the work within the farm, but into their broader community as well,” Manley says. “And we’re finding that these women and men feel more empowered to share in decision making that’s happening at the household level.”

MARS has made great progress regarding other crops in its supply chain: a sustainable rice farming program that the company fostered in Pakistan has increased farmers’ incomes by 75 percent, increased yields by 17 percent, reduced water use by 30 percent, and saved MARS roughly $12 million. The company still has plenty of work to do on decent work and economic growth, Manley says, pointing to its partnerships with the World Cocoa Foundation and The Consumer Goods Forum to end child labor and forced labor in its supply chain as well as plans to address gender pay gaps in its direct operations.

By helping disenfranchised female farmers in one of its most productive agricultural regions, however, the company has plotted a course for greater good. “No one company or one industry can solve these issues,” Manley says. “But we’ve all got a role to play.”

Digging into the supply chain, MARS has taken a multipronged approach. The company uses its contract power and expects its direct suppliers to meet its Supplier Code of Conduct. Collaboration is the key to effecting change in second tier and beyond. MARS has found partners with independent certification programs that share its goals, conducted its own research to fill gaps in best practices, and joined with expert NGOs working in key regions.

Connecting a business in North America with the lives of workers around the world two or more steps removed can be daunting, but working through the supply chain can lead to new opportunities for all parties. “It’s instructive how MARS applies the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals as it has taken on its raw materials sourcing, systematically working towards coupled sustainability and equity goals, rather than just mitigating individual impacts in isolation,” comments Beardsley. “We can all learn from this example. The Sustainable Development Goals intentionally integrate dimensions of people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership. By pushing us to understand the full scope of our actions, the Goals set us on a process that helps reveal new ways to positively influence outcomes and do better for everyone.”

Mars tackles quality of life challenges for farmers in alignment with U.N. SDGs