Framework for South African companies to operationalise the sustainable development goals

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.