A UN Start-Up with Big Ideas

Shaping innovative ways to help implement, and deliver on, the United Nations 2030 Agenda, the Geneva-based SDG Lab seeks to bring together multiple actors to bundle and deploy their expertise, and exploit opportunities that offer shared benefits and add real value. In existence since June 1, 2017, SDG Lab is small and nimble as it engages with multiple stakeholders with a foot- or toehold in what is, arguably, one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.

“SDG Lab offers a space for interdisciplinary collaboration across an exceptionally wide array of sectors. By poking at established wisdom and asking pertinent questions, we try to find common ground and creative solutions that can help achieve real progress towards meeting the seventeen sustainable development goals [SDGs],” says Lab director Nadia Isler who started her career at Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) and later joined the Swiss Foreign Ministry as an expert in development affairs.

SDG Practicalities

The Lab was set up to help governments and other stakeholders deal effectively with the practicalities of the SDGs. This involves, amongst others, ensuring that the voices – and concerns – of stakeholders are clearly heard by the people and organisations that matter. SDG Lab also helps by establishing links between possible partners and producing novel ways to meet challenges by tapping into the vast reservoir of collective knowledge and expertise available in Geneva.

As such, SDG Lab fulfils four essential tasks:

• Facilitating connections and brokering partnerships between UN entities, member states, and a host of civil society and private sector organisations, in order to promote dialogue and interactions, and strengthen the cooperation between stakeholders in the pursuit of the SDGs.
• Providing a space for all stakeholders to look for new approaches and processes to common challenges. Promising solutions, found through experimentation and a moderate degree of risk-taking, may then be tested at country level. Once their effectiveness has been determined, these solutions may be scaled up and deployed widely in order to replicate their success.
• Bringing together, and disseminating, experiences gathered from around the world as stakeholders work towards the implementation of the SDGs. As such, the Lab functions as a forum where both success and failure may be shared and lessons learned.
• Detecting and understanding the incentives that help drive an integrated approach to SDG-implementation and cause actors to become more receptive to the changes required to meet the 2030 Agenda. SDG Lab aims to ask questions, sometimes inconvenient ones, that prod actors and stakeholders to rethink their approach and, perhaps, seek solutions outside the proverbial box.

“To summarise, SDG Lab offers the convening power of the UN, and the credibility and neutrality of the organisation to join partners that otherwise would possibly not have crossed paths. SDG Lab is located in Geneva because it is precisely this city that boasts a unique ecosystem which includes nearly all stakeholders: 176 UN member states, 35 UN agencies, some 350 non-governmental organisations, academia, and of course a flourishing business sector. Though Geneva is our backbone, our vision is to create a model that can be replicated elsewhere in the world.”

Partnership Dynamics

Ms Isler explains that SDG Lab is particularly interested in mapping and analysing the dynamics of successful partnerships: “What are the drivers and incentives that make a difference for development and how partnerships can be made sustainable so that they are not crippled when there is a change on leadership.”

Ms Isler details the attempts of the Niger government to leapfrog development by deploying technology: “This can take the form of widely used e-health apps that improve outcomes or tech-driven initiatives in education or agriculture. The Niger government recognises that a lot of expertise is readily available in Geneva but may not be that clear on who does what and how. This is where SDG Lab comes into play, identifying needs and establishing links. In the case of Niger, it just took us two days to forge three or four partnerships. However, we wish to go a lot further and offer countries such as Niger an institutionalised and easily scalable model that includes not only expertise but also access to finance or, inversely, the ability to showcase investment opportunities.”

Pointing to the Geneva skyline, Ms Isler notes that the city is home to a great many banks and investment funds that, looking for yield, may want to engage: “Lots of investors run scared because of the perceived risks. So, it’s up to us to show bring these people in contact with opportunities further afield and look for innovative ways to address their legitimate concerns.”

Toddler Organisation

Blended finance is one of the many modalities SDG Lab is looking into, using development funds and philanthropic contributions to catalyse and mobilise private capital in a tripartite approach to provide financing for the 2030 Agenda in emerging and frontier markets.

Still a young organisation – a ‘toddler’ according to Ms Isler – SDG Lab is barely eighteen months old and thus very much a start-up. From the get-go, Ms Isler was determined to avoid offering ready-made solutions. She is also not in the mood to preach to others either: “That’s not what SDG Lab is about. Instead, we want to bring aboard expertise from all relevant sectors, including academia where a lot of applied research is being conducted that could be applicable across the world.” Ms Isler mentions Geneva University which has partnered with Tsinghua University in China to set up a master study on SDGs and produce novel yet tried-and-tested solutions.

SDG Lab is not without ambition. The UN start-up, a disruptor of sorts of established practices, wants to become a hub for the exchange of information: “Take a city such as Rome or Nairobi – or for that matter Mogadishu. They all have their unique expertise and experience. What we wish to do is to create meta-links between all these poles of knowledge, pool, sort, and process the resulting data sets, and offer a as-close-to-perfect mix of solutions – via partnerships – to any given problem anywhere in the world.”

“The important thing to remember that SDG Lab is most certainly not a kumbaya exercise: we do not expect, or indeed want, bankers and investors to engage with us for motives other than their bottom line. We fully expect them to ask ‘what’s in it for us?’ That said, and asked, there are myriad ways to partner and mitigate risk whilst delivering tangible profits all round.”

Cover photo: Nadia Isler, Director of SDG Lab, moderates the SDG – So What event discussing gender equality and innovation.

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© 2017 Photo by Emmanuel Berrod – World Intellectual Property Organization