In New York, United States of America, leaders from business, government, the United Nations and civil society came together in a 24-hour online congress at the annual UN Global Compact Leaders Summit.
Led by UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Sanda Ojiambo, Assistant Secretary-General and CEO of the UN Global Compact, more than 12,000 participants and leaders from the United Nations, governments, civil society, and local UN Global Compact networks from all time zones participated alongside Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón and Timor-Leste President José Ramos-Horte.
The overarching goal of all participants, is the ambition to strengthen business for a just, equitable and sustainable world.
In addition to the mostly virtual interactions between participants, the event also included face-to-face meetings in Bangkok, Thailand, and the opening of the UN Stockholm +50 Conference to commemorate the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and celebrate 50 years of global environmental action.
In addition to the overarching themes of accelerating and expanding the global collective impact of business by enabling the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through responsible business and ecosystems, topical issues such as the impact of the Corona pandemic, climate catastrophe, and the Ukraine war were also addressed and dispersed.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón further pointed to building public-private partnerships between small and large organizations and joining our forces to look for creative solutions to move us closer to our common goals.
As a possible approach to reducing poverty, Timor-Leste President José Ramos-Horte appealed to the business community to end poverty while protecting and promoting human and labor rights: "How can we, the private sector and the government, work together to mobilize resources so that we can free children from child labor and child slavery and rescue our fellow human beings, hundreds of millions of them, from extreme poverty? This is my message and my appeal to all of you."
The UN Global Compact also announced a new SME Engagement Strategy to leverage the collective action of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on the SDGs.
Link to the event: https://events.unglobalcompact.org/leaderssummit22/