How do you align learning networks and social impact bonds with the Sustainable Development Goals?

Learning networks are powerful for collaborative sharing of industry experience, knowledge, and governance around industry niches. To thrive from the collective power of a learning network, each participant must feel that their contribution to the greater good is driving the industry and themselves forward. Learning networks provide a great platform to showcase new opportunities and build collective feedback on where to pursue and push forward with certain industry best practices, understanding and tackling common challenges, developing a common industry standard to reduce wastage and optimise business inter-operational efficiencies.

Social impact bonds can drive much needed financial support to projects that require financing, however they may not qualify to raise this financing through through traditional means. Since there is a huge shortfall in capital require to deliver the world's sustainable development goals, impact bonds are a powerful way to get funds into the hands of those businesses that need capital to make their impact.

Subject to the related projects that are being funded, each may have a focussed sub set of SDGs that they make a material impact on. Ideally their is a direct correlation with clearly measurable and monitoring outcomes that are full transparent and thus tracking financing of projects and SDG impact would become more targets for investors to deliver upon specific impacts.

It may also provide an opportunity to foster innovation and creativity in the development of sustainable solutions. By engaging diverse stakeholders and promoting cross-sector collaboration, these initiatives can generate novel ideas and approaches that not only address pressing social and environmental challenges but also drive economic growth and create new business opportunities. Furthermore, such partnerships can help build resilience and adaptive capacity by encouraging experimentation, iteration, and learning from failures.

Ideally aligning your leaning network with social impact bonds, would help organisation and partners to drive capital into projects that really make a sustainable develop goal impact during the life span of the investment and thus the worlds would move to a more positively re-enforced way to handle and acknowledge progress for making an impact on delivering the SDGs.

There is a general lack of standardised data collection for SDGs. Both defining and then measuring the impact can be highly objective for corporates. Thus right now as the securities regulators tend to drive investment houses to focus on climate bonds and carbon credits, there is a true misalignment in where capital is being driven to and where capital is actually required to deliver the worlds sustainable development goals.