How can technical expertise and economic empowerment support underserved communities and provide solutions to diversity, equity, and inclusion?

This article is part of the “The road to sustainability” weekly review on Linkedin. It is an initiative by Nevelab Technologies–every week, covering approaches and strategies to plan sustainability.

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Article summary: 

The future of organizations depends on an effective, highly skilled workforce to carry out their mission—protecting employees; stakeholders; investors; maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient environments, respecting market extensions; and facilitating capital formation.

It is critical to operating through a continued commitment to promoting diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity and allowing companies to attract and retain talent with the mix of skills and expertise needed to maximize effectiveness. In addition, leveraging diversity and inclusion throughout technological expertise and economic empowerment helps ensure the regulatory programs and guidance reflect the diversity of the ecosystem and businesses that depend on each organization's activity.

Put simply, in order to perform at the highest level, to overcome the current crisis and evolve businesses need to ensure that their work and workforce reflect a diversity of thoughts, backgrounds, and experiences.

The next steps also include that diversity, inclusion, and opportunity should be reflected in the outward-facing aspects of organizations’ work, including through ensuring that education and outreach efforts adequately encompass underserved communities.

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Foreword

The global population is projected to grow from 6.9 billion people to 9 billion by 2050.

A new report by the United Nations predicts 2.5 billion more people will live in urban areas by 2050. While in other regions growth will slow significantly, thirty-five percent of the projected urban population growth between 2018 and 2050 will occur in India, China, and Nigeria.

An important point now is that the COVID-19 outbreak is taking a devastating toll on the lives of underserved communities around the world. Nobody really knows how long will the current crisis last, and at the moment the poorest countries are the ones seeing the most damage to the environment.

To help those affected, front-lines organizations supporting and scaling effective solutions throughout the course of the pandemic–from immediate relief to long-term recovery and future preparedness–need more technology and science. 

Actually, we have a lot to learn from their actions, plan bold, wide-ranging strategies that will help stimulate innovative solutions. Sustainable developments depend growingly on the successful management of urban growth, especially in low-income and lower-middle-income countries where the pace of urbanization is projected to be the fastest.

This simply shows that we need more innovation on a global scale: if we would be able to speed up the accumulation and application of knowledge for innovation we would be able to solve major issues:

• It is crucial to understand the key trends in urbanization, and the challenges we will face over the coming years: education, food security water management, the development of cohesive institutions and inclusive societies.
• It is critical to operating through a continued commitment to promoting diversity inclusion and equal opportunity and translate our current environments with more effective policies, sustainable urban governance, and efficient workforces.
• It is essential to design strategies for managing urbanization and "ensure access to infrastructure and social services for all, focusing on the needs of the underserved communities, poor populations and vulnerable groups for housing, education, health care, decent work, and a safe environment.

On the other hand, the world continues to evolve toward optimization and redefinition of productivity in the value and production chains and seeks to improve the uses of resources. As we saw in our previous reviews, organizations increasingly forge alliances with tech leaders and diverse boards to collaborate and deliver agility, build resilience, and improve performance.

A meaningful trait of high performing organizations is the strong investment in tech teams with diverse backgrounds and mindsets that support proved their progress and allow innovation that efficiently drives transformational growth. Open innovation, open research and development, and open business models are becoming definitively popular in practice and academia: the benefits that come along need to be fully purpose-driven and inclusive.

In the process, and now as it is possible to collect accurate-enough open data to assign shared value, the pivotal point for organizations will be how to embrace accountability, and take business risks, and for policymakers to endure whether this is good for the global economy. Obviously balancing risk‐taking and promoting cumulative innovation are challenging social questions, yet in the long term, society will inevitably reward bold leadership responsibility, equity, and leverage. 

Global approach for more sustainable economies and ethical dimension

By 2030, however, the number of megacities is expected to increase with more than 10 million inhabitants. Many of them will be in developing regions, but some of the fastest-growing will be cities currently with a population of less than one million (again, most will be located in Asia and Africa):

• Many countries will face challenges in meeting the needs of their growing urban populations, including for housing, transportation, energy systems, and other infrastructure, as well as for employment and basic services such as education and health care, if it’s not already the case. [Learn more here]
• In addition to an increase in urbanization, there will also be a rise in megacities. Today, there are 33 megacities throughout the world – Tokyo* is the largest with a population of 37 million. One in eight people live in a megacity, but nearly half of the world's population lives in smaller areas, with a population of fewer than 500,000 people. [Learn more here]
• Urbanization and population growth will continue to create new challenges in the distribution of goods over “the last mile” in our crowded megacities. This brings a more complex perspective on production, logistics, and supply management: we need to rethink assumptions for the sustainability era.  [Learn more here]
• The transition to a more circular future will rely on the acceleration and the development of resource use decoupled from economic growth across industries and on a global scale. [Learn more here]
• The demonstrable benefits of developing open-source software for social initiatives will lead to their wider adoption, and failure to invest in them will be fatal for many organizations’ network effects. [Learn more here]
• Effective integrated policies will improve the lives of both urban and rural dwellers while strengthening the linkages between urban and rural areas, building on their existing economic, social, and environmental ties. [Learn more here]

To create environmental sustainability and ethical wealth, we need to leverage small-scale exchange between humans that’s voluntary and doesn’t have an outsized impact on others. We can then talk about "free minds" and "free markets".

Let’s consider an entrepreneur instead of having a single source of motivation, such as maximizing profit, now has two sources of motivation which are maturely exclusive but equally compelling - “maximization of profit” and “doing good to people in the world”. Each type of motivation will lead to a separate kind of business. 

Yet, by defining its leadership in a broader way we can change the character of its approach to capitalism in a radical way and widespread this attitude toward the entire ecosystem, that will be more capable to solve many of the unresolved social and economic problems within the scope of the free market.

Of course, this could sound like an idealistic representation of society. The biggest flaw in the present interpretation of capitalism lies in its misrepresentation of human nature: human beings engaged in business are portrayed as one-dimensional beings whose only mission is to maximize profit. This is a much distorted picture of a human being since this interpretation denies any roles to other aspects of life - political, social, emotional, spiritual, environmental and more - not just from “making money”. The theory of capitalism and the marketplace that has grown around makes no room for the selfless dimension of the people - those who are “ethical”. 

Now to return to the point of the current crisis: governments have come up with supersized bailout packages for the failing institutions, yet most of these projects will be deployed later than expected, unlocked with delay, and will probably arrive combined with ambitious programs. Whereas less impressive packages, if any will be offered to victims of the crisis which is somehow an interesting point for the three billion bottom people on the planet that sustains us all" ...

Unfortunately, the political/media coverage gives us all the impression that once we fix this crisis all our troubles will be over: we just forget that the ongoing crisis represents all several global crises including the healthcare crisis, the financial crisis, the energy crisis, the environmental crisis–these are not disconnected crises–and this, in the continuing social and economic problems of poverty which have not received any attention. All these crises grew from the same route the fundamental flaw in the theoretical construct of the unethical initial conception of capitalism.

Nonetheless, there's always a particular momentum, just like now during the crisis that emerging industries can lead emergencies toward opportunities.

Advancing diversity and inclusion for economic empowerment

A rational bottom-up approach to diversity and inclusion

One of the most important ways in which the organization can create value is by doing more with less. Now in the current context, and as the social sector in which there's a lack of resources, operations could be supported by explicit well-balanced cost of minimization and efficient maximized quality, a supportive environment is even more important.

An impressive variety of approaches emerges from the analysis of the current crisis: the most direct effects of the lack of frameworks and acknowledged models, both in the social entrepreneurship field where we have corporations demonstrating their efforts by investing in innovative solutions and supportive contributions to organizations and in the venture capitalist and philanthropy areas. The discussion here is that this is not enough and we need more to redesign, recover, and rebuild.

And here's the point, we’ve explored on several occasions that an organization’s greatest asset is its workforce. Implementing a Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan will help extend broader goals of increasing capabilities, leveraging shared commitments to investors, investing and promoting diversity and inclusion, and equality of opportunity among staff and stakeholders. [Learn more here]

Notwithstanding diversity makes it difficult to reduce to universally valid networks, the real change will come as ecosystem service valuations filter down to individual needs:

• Organizational dimension: develop more inclusive partnerships and diverse approaches to managing relations with the leaders and stakeholders long term perspectives, providing support over the entire recovery phase to tackle social issues and achieve social change. This is even more relevant since the social sector's lack of resources is a founding attribute: the scarcity of models and acknowledged best practices makes it critical to building organizational environments in which the variety of competencies and creative skills can propagate an adaptive culture.
• A collaborative/rational dimension to measure performance and develop an appropriate approach and strategy that measure its ability to survive in the long term. Building networks is critical, and in order to scale sustainability and impact, organizations should inevitably base their operations on a participatory and learning management methodology. In other words, the complex nature of social issues makes it necessary to involve a number of different constituencies: each one bringing specific knowledge and involve alliances with for-profit companies, non-profit organizations, and public actors.
• The continuous support in developing the purpose-driven business capacity building. The specific scaling strategy has to be determined by the organization's knowledge community and by the innovation references that will characterize the consistency of the mission and its spread. For organizations and businesses, the extend of the diverse workforce will also embody different perspectives and approaches to work and will be reflected in the mission lying on the value of the variety of opinions and insights.

Sustainable management and social business in the real world

The approach to sustainability has evolved across three eras. In the beginning, it consisted of largely defensive efforts to reduce companies’ environmental footprints and cut waste, essentially seen as an operational concern. It has evolved into a more strategic focus shifted from cost reduction to innovation, and initiatives began to consider the whole value chain process. Now we’re considering sustainability as part of the decision process niched at the core of any enterprise. This leads us to the point of progress in ecosystem services valuation that has seen recent shifts in the world of socially responsible investing.

SRI influences corporations to show leadership in environmental sustainability, social justice, and corporate governance practices. Yet, like any business project, a sustainable business organization needs capital whether in the form of debt or equity. Whilst some of the financial requirements particularly for the production cycle could come from financial institutions under standard terms and conditions, equity in long-term assets financing requires resources in order to be better geared to the economic empowerment of emerging social initiatives.

Obviously, this concerns all organizations of all sizes willing to achieve a sustainable objective. The plan is about setting innovation in production processes, innovation in methods, and distribution channels. In addition, seeking the lowest possible price is to make a product affordable to the poorest puts pressure on the traditional model. 

And yet collectively we have not been making progress on reducing the damage business does to the world.

The present global state is characterized by a deep confusion between markets, its laws, rules, and politics.

The imperative is to achieve optimal processes to “clear” the markets and push institutions toward an approach to microfinance solutions or decentralization to ensure a good governance availability, finance may become less unreliable and more efficient in fact:

1. It is a sad well-known fact that developing countries suffer from financial repression. The basic concept is that credit availability is often erratic or uncertain. This is due to a combination of factors such as government releases on interest rates controls on exchange rates and an over-reliance on direct forms of controlling the money supply such as higher reserve ratios. This is why many developing countries fail to grow.
2. The development of social businesses will therefore have to be driven by the creation of special sustainability funds, support digital skills training for job seekers, equitable access to capital, and small and medium businesses—particularly in underrepresented communities.
3. Urban cities will be able to better grow and modernize, most markets will become larger by openly sharing perspectives focusing on user-centric design and consciously exploring potential outcomes to avoid untended harmful results from conglomerates.

Research and innovation to liberalize the markets and rescue the economy

Globalization, demographic changes, and technological advances pose important challenges and unique opportunities for research and innovation.

The very structure of a sustainable business requires that teams create alternative solutions to adapt to the growing demands of urbanization but also in reflecting on the trends and articulating scenarios, practice, and readjustment on the evolving goals.

Organizations have both the responsibility and the mission to support equitable access to quality learning materials, computer science education, and digital responsibility resources.

• Improve group and team performance by expanding the talent pool and leveraging different perspectives and skillsets.
• Foster a culture of inclusion where employees feel respected and their perspectives and contributions valued.
• Examine potential barriers to both diversity and inclusion and design solutions to overcome those obstacles.

Technology and innovation for purpose-driven ecosystems

Organizations using technology to address societal and environmental challenges, empower third-party advocates to share the value, responsibility, and accessibility of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.

The AI mathematical-based models are ubiquitous, providing a quantitative framework for understanding, predicting, and decision making in nearly every aspect of life, ranging from the monitoring of the spread of the current disease to resource management to the timing of city lights, to sports and gaming. They also play a fundamental role in all-natural sciences and increasingly in the social sciences as well.

Actually, and we can see this with the data arising from the propagation of the pandemic, the most common difficulties faced by data scientists and engineers are occurring when tackling complex projects with a large number of iterations and experimentations.

AI architectures that incorporate crucial code and resource optimizations, versioning and collaboration, and data integration and deployment are more than ever demanded. We need more models through in-depth observation of the emerging world, and social sector initiatives that make use of a range of continuous and never-ending evolving technical tools.

Universities, labs, and garages create enormous amounts of innovation—and there’s more coming every day. Today’s challenge is delivering innovation to people in ways that advance humankind through data, vision, and will.

Conclusion: on the look for ideas with the potential to change the world

For a very long time and like most “holy grail” objectives, sustainability as an objective most depending route to financial high performance has seemed beyond reach. But with the ongoing paradigm shift combined with the dramatic effects on society: the values of many essential aspects of our world that were traditionally considered externalities are now considered as integral parts of any organization's mission and being quantified into economic equations. 

Socially responsible investment became gradually more mature as a value-seeking discipline and a positive thrust for change. Progress is inevitable and became a sign of prosperity for organizations. Industries seek improvements throughout their value chains and rely on standard indices to rate product sustainability and alignment with stakeholders is a guarantee of quality.

One more important thing is to create tools to help us face the future with confidence, understand opportunities and risks, and help us develop more medium to long term strategies for research, science, and innovation policy. It takes many guises: trends, signals, scenarios, visions, road-maps, and plans that are all parts of the tool-box for looking to the future. In addition, we need platforms that require an in-depth reflection on the policy implications and related scenarios.

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This article is a preview of session 8 in continuation of the previous sessions of The Road to Sustainability weekly review in which we started to look at some of the leading aspects of why considering a sustainability strategy is essential in order to resolve companies to get into a recovery process, increase their competitiveness and expand their aspirations to deliver a positive societal impact.

We will provide case studies and examples of sustainable initiatives during the webinar session "How can technical expertise and economic empowerment support underserved communities and provide solutions to diversity, equity, and inclusion?" Monday, December 7, join us: impact.nevelab.com

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To learn more from the webinar series, get the presentations and details, explore technical aspects, and specific processes, we created the Nevelab's Vault. Join us here.

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Resources

Statistics and resources about countries and urban mega-cities: Japan, China, India, Nigeria

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Disclosure

The road to sustainability is an initiative by Nevelab Technologies.

Nevelab is a purpose-driven platform that leverages artificial intelligence to provide organizations with the tools to integrate sustainable imperatives while generating actionable insights.