India’s 2030 Business Agenda
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The UN India Business Forum (UNIBF) is a groundbreaking alliance of India’s key economic influencers, aimed at accelerating progress towards rapid growth and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. It is led by committed business leaders who, together with the government, can play a significant role in addressing the country’s most urgent development challenges, and unlock opportunities to innovate at scale.
Since its launch in Mumbai in 2017, UNIBF has evolved from a dialogue forum into a tangible partnership, which has helped steer innovative and disruptive partnerships as well as instruments for the SDGs.
Some of the Forum’s policy recommendations have served as inputs in important flagship initiatives like the National Urban Housing and Habitat Policy 2017, and a number of catalytic financing instruments have emerged from this collaboration.
From Funding to Financing
This year, the UNIBF will focus on the growing recognition that philanthropy and siloed approaches to ‘funding’ the SDGs are no longer enough. Global business engagement is now shifting to innovative ‘financing’ instruments, joint public-private initiatives, a focus on measurable outcomes, and full supply chain approaches for sustainable businesses. Innovative finance could take the form of guarantees, social impact bonds, social insurance, and impact investments, that address specific market failure, generate momentum to enhance government resources, and reduce risk, thereby offering contractual certainty to investors.
The UNIBF CEO Roundtable 2018 will facilitate an important conversation on these themes, shaped by business leaders themselves. The discussion aims to introduce concrete new ideas, pioneering partnerships, and financing instruments for the SDGs that can be taken up by the forum in the coming year.
