TOGETHER FOR SDGs: Financing the SDGs: Malaysian Private Sector Role in Bridging the Gap from Goals to Actions

The Circular Economy Club of Kuala Lumpur and its members have been invited to the Parliament of Malaysia to engage on the below.

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) are a universal plan for all countries to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. They are a set of 17 goals which include 169 targets. They provide a focus for the international community’s development efforts until 2030 and are the yardstick by which progress will be measured. They are intended to be tackled as a group rather than individually – the 17 goals are interlinked.

At the international level, the annual funding gap for the Sustainable Development Goals is many trillions of dollars. The only way to close that gap is with the help of the private sector – in particular, by impelling companies to account in their decision-making for environmental, social, and governance issues relevant to the SDGs. Estimates of the development investment gap are typically in the trillions of dollars, while official development assistance is hovering around $140 billion per year. One effective way to help close this funding gap is to catalyze substantial investment from the private sector.

This is representative of the Malaysian context, in which Private Sector needs to play a key role in enabling the achievement of the National SDG agenda. This needs to be achieved by tapping into multi-million ringgit collective CSR funds, new financing modalities and innovative consumer facing products that enable the acceleration of the 17 SDG Goals. This session is designed to examine how the Private Sector can contribute to a sustainable world as an alternative resource provider and to discover the various innovative SDG financing modalities that can be leveraged for better business excellence.