The Mexican private sector and the SDGs

Earlier this year, the UN Global Compact’s Mexican Chapter published a roadmap for Mexican corporates to help them understand where we the local private sector currently stands in terms of commitment to the 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as how this can be improved.

You can read the full report here (it has lots of interesting data), and you can see below what we think are the most interesting findings:

1. 70% out of the 776 Mexican corporates which participated in the study say they are aligned to the SDGs.
2. 17% of these companies do not know the SDGs yet.
3. 31% of them have a team member focused on sustainability issues.
4. 23% of the companies that participated in the study and have sales above 250 million pesos (large companies) do not have a budget for sustainability issues.
5. 28% of them assign less than 400 thousand pesos (~20 thousand dollars) to their annual sustainability budget.
6. No company chose environmental SDGs within their top sustainability priorities.
7. The most popular SDGs within the corporates which participated in the study are SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being), SDG 5 (Gender Equality), and SDG 4 (Quality Education).
8. Only 2% of the large companies consider SDG 16 (Peace, justice, and strong institutions) a priority.
9. It is estimated that 30% of the SDGs were negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic (including the estimated 150 million people who are now living under extreme poverty conditions again).
10. The biggest hurdle for a higher contribution to the SDGs appears to be a lack of budget and then a lack of understanding of what SDGs entail.

SDGs have gained significant relevance over the past few years as they have become a way to understand how to better contribute to the world’s sustainability, as well as a way to communicate your contributions to people who are not sustainability experts more clearly. In the financial industry, they have also gained relevance as now there are even financial products linked to the contributions to SDGs.

We completely agree that the lack of understanding of SDGs is one of the reasons the private sector is not more actively contributing to their achievement. In our experience, this lack of understanding is still quite prevalent within the corporate arena. We therefore believe reports such as the one we quote this week are very important as they help companies understand how other companies are contributing towards this topic and find ways to bridge the gaps.

If you have any questions on SDGs overall and how you can tie them to your sustainability strategy, please feel free to reach out. We think the effort will be worth it.

I hope you found this interesting. As usual, if there is anything we can help you with, please reach out.

Best,

Marimar

CEO, Miranda ESG