The 2030 Agenda, with 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 intermediate objectives for sustainable development, aims to eliminate poverty and hunger, achieve human rights for everyone, ensure equality and empowerment for all women and girls, and secure lasting protection for the planet and its natural resources. The Sustainable Development Goals are integrated and indivisible, and balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental.
How does Swedfund contribute?
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides a framework and basis for our primary mission, which is to reduce poverty (SDG 1). Our approach is to create the conditions for inclusive growth and the tool we use to achieve this is sustainable business.
To do this we have incorporated sustainability in everything we do; we invest in those sectors where we believe we can achieve the most, we have incorporated sustainability issues into our investment process, and we regularly follow up results in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals and our strategic sustainability targets.
• The most significant issues for our business are:
• Decent work
• Gender equality
• Environment and climate
• Tax
• Human rights
• Anti-corruption measures
The Sustainable Development Goals that we and our portfolio companies mainly relate to are:
SDG 1 – Swedfund’s mission as a development finance institution is to reduce poverty by investing in sustainable business.
SDG 5 – By putting requirements in place, setting targets for the percentage of men and women to converge at all levels of our portfolio businesses, and by measuring and monitoring results, we help increase gender equality.
SDG 7 – Swedfund invests in renewable energy production projects. DFIs fulfil an important role as providers of financing at the early stages of higher-risk energy projects. We are accelerating private-sector investment in the renewable energy sector in developing economies.
SDG 8 – We are working across all our investments on the decent work agenda, through active advocacy work and by following up on portfolio businesses’ compliance with ILO Core Fundamental Conventions.
SDG 12 – We set requirements for and engage actively with environmental and social aspects of our portfolio businesses’ activities. This allows us to contribute to the development of sustainable production.
SDG 13 – Swedfund endeavours to minimise negative climate effects in all our investments, and our environment and climate-related work is an integral part of our investment process. We have developed a methodology to estimate the climate impact of all our portfolio businesses.
SDG 16 – Tax revenue lays the foundations for countries to develop structures for key social functions that form the basis for sustainable development. Swedfund has engaged actively for a number of years with the issue of tax in our businesses. Corruption is another factor that makes combating poverty harder. Swedfund takes a zero-tolerance approach to corruption and we require all our businesses to implement a management system to handle anti-corruption issues.
SDG 17 – We work actively with civil society and the business sector to enter partnerships in which we can share know-how and generate more extensive and long-lasting results.
