Sanda Ojiambo runs the United Nations Global Compact, the body that mobilizes the private sector around the UN’s goals and that counted fifteen thousand member companies at the time of this conversation. The correction she makes twice, unprompted, is about what it is not. It is not a CSR organization; what it asks is that companies shift their resources, financing, technology, products and services.
The founding phrase she quotes is older than the vocabulary this conversation is conducted in. Kofi Annan, who established the Compact in 2000, said he wanted to bring a human face to the global market, and Ojiambo points out the overlap with humanized growth herself.
Key findings
- Ojiambo’s case for why business has to engage at all is a matter of duration rather than obligation: business cannot succeed in the long term if the society around it is failing.
- What a company gets from membership has three parts: learning, connecting and leading. She is explicit that the point of all three is a fourth thing, action that shifts the areas material to that business.
- Entry requires a letter of commitment from the chief executive specifically, because sustainable business is not the work of the head of sustainability or the head of supply chain but of the entire company.
- Members file an annual report called the communication on progress. The Compact had just digitized and relaunched it on a phased basis, so progress against the principles becomes visible over years rather than at a single point.
- Asked how many of the world’s largest companies have actually aligned strategy to the goals, she declines to estimate, saying the Compact does not track it. She names Unilever, Marks and Spencer, the Natura group and her former employer Safaricom as companies that have done the work.
Do not start with all seventeen
Ojiambo’s advice against being overwhelmed is a two-part filter. Do not be daunted by the seventeen goals; look instead at which are material to your area of business and which of those you can actually influence. Size is not a qualification either, since the goals apply to large and small companies alike, and a large company’s real leverage sits in its supply chain rather than at headquarters.
Under the goals sits the part she treats as durable: the ten principles set out when the Compact was founded, covering human rights, labor rights, the environment and anti-corruption. They carried through from the Millennium Development Goals to the current ones, which is why she calls them the organization’s core DNA. A company uses them as a gap analysis, then developing policies, setting targets and being held to them.
Whom she actually works with inside a company
Membership starts with a letter of commitment signed by the chief executive, and Ojiambo’s reason is scope rather than protocol. Sustainable business is not the work of the head of sustainability or the head of supply chain, she says, but of the whole company. What is being asked for is a shift in strategy and in how the company sees itself in its ecosystem.
Below that signature the work lands wherever it fits. She names sustainability leads and chief financial officers, and human resources when the internal principles concern rights, and says the Compact is working hard to bring more marketing leads and CMOs on board. Anyone who does not know whether their own employer has joined can look the company name up on the Compact’s website.
Three places a marketer plays
The first is positioning, which Ojiambo puts squarely inside the marketing remit: how a business positions itself on purpose is a brand issue. The example she develops is a self-esteem campaign, and what interests her is the second-order effect rather than the brand result. She asks what such work does for women’s empowerment and confidence, for gender-based violence, and for the sense that speaking out about inequality is possible.
The second is the product itself, where her questions are about materials, packaging and product life cycles rather than message. The third is what a company says day to day. She is not a communications specialist, she says, but in a period of heightened consumer awareness what a company puts out should be driven by marketing and grounded in purpose and principles.
Her observation about which companies have succeeded is that they did not pick one of the three. The ones that have credibly demonstrated a position on sustainable and responsible business, she says, took a big win across all three areas at once.
Five things she has watched companies get wrong
The first is motive: she rules out the one that will not survive a difficult year. A company cannot do this simply because capital appears to flow toward purpose-led firms. What is being asked for is an entire shift to running the business for the long term rather than the short. The second is cascading that reasoning rather than the conclusion, which needs board support first and business support after it.
The third is that the definition of success has to move, though she does not pretend the old measures disappear. Quarterly reporting and quarterly numbers still matter, but the long-term trajectory has to sit alongside them. The fourth is charting the multi-stakeholder ecosystem, which she says takes different shapes by industry. The customer is at the center, but regulators, government, investors and media may all belong in it.
The fifth is committing to the concrete action, and her position on the returns is a matter of sequence rather than of faith. Do the right thing and the numbers will come, she says, but a company has to be sure it can take the actions that move it forward. She calls the whole thing a journey and a reorientation rather than an initiative with an end date.
When the investor conversation stopped being about the numbers
Ojiambo’s evidence that the shift is real comes from Safaricom, where she headed sustainable business and social impact before moving to New York. The entire brand communication there was about transforming lives and had nothing to do with telecoms, and the measures of success widened to match. Carbon footprint, gender equality, women in STEM and an inclusive supply chain all counted toward what a successful company looked like.
The change she reports came over successive investor road shows. After a couple of years the questions stopped being about the financials, which were good, and became requests to explain the company’s sustainability fundamentals. Investors wanted to know how it would make more people in Kenya financially included, and what value growing the network added to the Kenyan economy.
Purpose as a moving destination
Asked about her own purpose, Ojiambo first rejects the premise that a person has one and keeps it. Purpose is not a final destination, she says, and the last two years showed how radically what looks meaningful can change with circumstances. She reads the great resignation the same way, as people realizing that what once looked purposeful was done for the business rather than for themselves.
Her own has held for about twenty five years: using whatever skills, experience and platforms she finds herself with to address inequality. Growing up in Kenya, a country with immense wealth alongside immense lack of it, taught her that the deprivation is not primarily about money. It is a lack of choice and a lack of dignity, and you do not always need cash to live a dignified life.
The career is a sequence of vantage points on the same question. She studied economics to understand the distribution of wealth, then public policy to see which frameworks let those systems persist. Roughly ten years in the NGO sector followed, from grassroots work to pan-African policy, then the corporate sector and now the UN. She also includes the part usually left out: she wanted a policy think tank job, spent eight months failing to get one, and went home instead.
Taking over a global organization without meeting anyone
Ojiambo took the role from Nairobi, in a virtual handover ceremony held while her predecessor was in Copenhagen for the Compact’s annual convening. The Kenyan borders were shut and she could not have left if she had wanted to. When a window opened in September she flew over, and what she remembers of the journey is the emptiness: never such an empty flight, never such an empty Dubai airport.
The intervals she gives are precise. It took two to three months before she met more than two or three colleagues at a time, and a year and a month before she met her entire leadership team in person. A year and a half into the role she still had not met her whole team, though a Christmas gathering in New York had drawn about eighty percent of the staff there.
Her own ecosystem was rebuilt, and most people’s was not
Ojiambo did not leave her house for two months, and within a matter of weeks her ecosystem had been reshaped around a phone. Kenya’s mobile money and e-commerce infrastructure let her pay vendors directly, more quickly and efficiently than by card, and have goods brought to her by motorcycle rider. She credits it plainly as reaching levels of the financial system that card payments do not.
The qualification she attaches immediately is the reason the story is in the conversation at all. Those benefits reached only a select few in a country like hers. Many students could not continue school because they were not digitally connected. Many small and medium businesses shut down because the way they did business did not allow a seamless transition.
What if we had asked this twenty years ago
Asked what she wishes she had known earlier, Ojiambo reframes the question, because the answer did not exist to be known. The 1980s were when CSR took root. What she wishes is that business had been engaged earlier in a different way, asked not only to respond in that mode but to look at business purpose itself.
She works the counterfactual through three examples. Had that clarity and sense of urgency existed twenty years ago, she asks, would we be in the climate crisis we are in now. Had companies attended to gender equity and pay parity, where would women stand, given a figure she repeats for how implausible it sounds: 275 years to economic parity. And had child labor been ruled out, what would that mean for the millions of children who gave up an education.
The interviewer turns the counterfactual forward, asking what someone looking back twenty years from now would wish they had done today, and Ojiambo takes that as the operative version. Her closing instruction follows from it, and it is about scale rather than effort: be ambitious, and stretch within the opportunities that exist right now.
One reporting standard is not coming
Asked about the work on a common set of metrics, Ojiambo describes a crowded field rather than a converging one. Some of it is grounded in regulation, much of that coming through the EU, and some is focused on whichever issue is material at the moment, which is currently climate and the environment. Her own organization’s communication on progress is not a reporting standard, she says, but one of the broadest approaches to sustainability reporting.
Her forecast is a refusal to predict convergence, paired with what she is prepared to claim. She doubts the world will ever land on a single reporting framework. She is grateful, though, that the space has opened up far enough that a company’s success and its narrative no longer rest solely on its financials.
Scope and limitations
This is the head of a membership organization describing its own offer, recorded in early 2022, so the membership figures and the company examples are her statements rather than independent assessments. She declines to quantify how widely the goals have actually been adopted, and the Compact does not track it.
Source
This page summarises HGS #39: Sanda Ojiambo (CEO, UN Global Compact) on mobilizing businesses to achieve social impact, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022-02-16.