Abstract:
The current operating environment requires of companies to account for their social impact
and contribute towards national and global sustainability targets. With the adoption of the
Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 by the United Nations members, the Corporate
Social Responsibility expectations on corporates are enormous.
This research study provides South African corporates with a framework to operationalise
the new Sustainable Development Goals and to measure and compare their social value,
i.e. the impact, created within the context of Corporate Social Responsibility. The framework
enables companies to incorporate their Sustainable Development Goals strategy into their
performance management system and business review cycle.
Three research problems were identified as the key challenges to the implementation of this
framework: the identification and prioritisation of social need, the measurement of the social
impact of the intervention and finally the comparison between different social interventions,
nationally and internationally. To overcome these challenges, a composite index was
constructed for Sustainable Development Goal 1, as an example. The index was developed
from a structural equation model and the South African General Household Survey was used
as the research instrument. The Kroeger & Weber (2015) methodology was finally applied
to the composite index to demonstrate the measurement and comparison of social value.
This study extends upon the research of Smulowitz (2015) and Kroeger & Weber (2015)
and proposes a Sustainable Development Goal operationalisation framework, in which
performance is measured relative to the social need. There has been a positive trend
observed in monitoring and evaluation research in Africa, fueled by the social need of the
continent. This research study aims to contribute towards the further theoretical
development of this field.
