How to Rebuild Better with Impact: A Hybrid Financial and Social Inclusion and Well-Being Approach

By Kenneth Kwok, Founder and CEO, Global Citizen Capital

Kenneth Kwok, Founder and CEO, Global Citizen Capital

“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” ~ Milton Friedman.

2020 has been a monumentally significant year in more ways than one. Our planet is a decade away from the deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals (“SDGs”), yet when they were set in 2015, few would have anticipated a global pandemic affecting almost every country in the world. The predictions are dire, from the projected number of people who will leave behind loved ones from the virus to the impact on food security, well-being and capital markets, to the effect on the social fabric of many communities.

I would like to stress that capitalism isn’t moral or immoral when it comes to how it can be best deployed during these challenging times. It is amoral, and the job of capital allocators is to channel it in productive, impactful ways. We collectively need to put out faith behind accountable investing, while advocating for a broader scope of impact.

Among the crisis and chaos, there is also a real opportunity to rebuild better following the pandemic, in a way that leaves vulnerable people and communities significantly better off than they were before. Indeed, while not all companies, including startups, are impactful, the impact is imbued in the ethos of many financial communities. It’s the reason that entrepreneurs and investors spout mission statements about changing the world, and it is the reason that workers leave stable jobs for risky ones.

Decent jobs must be the top priority as gainful participation becomes a prevailing theme for rebounding from the pandemic. We must embrace other forms of impact: job creation; venture returns generated for endowments and pension funds; wealth creation for employees, which enable a variety of philanthropic organizations. Stakeholder capitalism is taking the place of shareholder capitalism. Meaningful participation has always been a part of our planet’s DNA, and we can take concrete steps to build back better and stronger together.

1. Building Purpose withProfit

There is and will be increasing demand from employees, customers, investors, and other stakeholders for ecosystems to more actively articulate and demonstrate their wider societal purpose beyond profits. This means recognizing that firms with purpose also do better financially. Such work should include tackling social inequality, protecting human rights, supporting climate change and acknowledging their carbon footprint, and being better at, and more transparent about, measuring impact.

We collectively need to put out faith behind accountable investing, while advocating for a broader scope of impact

2. Build 360-Degree Partnerships

COVID-19 has highlighted how truly interconnected we all are (boundaries are disappearing) as well as the large-scale challenges we face, such as inequity and climate action. As such, we need to rethink how we partner—shifting from traditional, transactional-style partnerships to ones that bring together multiple partners from across a company’s value chain, among peer groups, with government and civil society, plus other key stakeholder groups.

3. Upskilling for Resilience

The pandemic has been hugely disruptive to the world of work, output and learning, accelerating trends towards automation and new technology as we leap into frontier technologies. There is an urgent need for upskilling and reskilling workers—not only with hard skills but also with the soft skills which create the gel for long-term impact creation. To rebound as one, this becomes the prevailing theme for recovering from the pandemic—decent jobs must be the top priority.

4. Equity over Equality

The pandemic has affected communities differently, based on their gender, race, sexual orientation and income level. For example,women have been more exposed to infection as they make up the majority of front-line health workers. LGBTI individuals also are often in the most vulnerable positions in workforces and value chains—they have faced a surge in domestic violence, and they have taken on the burden of unpaid care.

5. Health is Wealth

The impact of the pandemic of physical health has been on everyone’s mind and is clearly a strategic focus to resolve. Recent promising news on vaccine does bring hope and optimism. At the same time, mental health of employees, working from home or remotely otherwise, as well as students undergoing the same, need to be addressed. Many technologiesare available to scientifically address stress and need to be made scalable, accessible, and affordable.

6. Support Systemic Integration across Value Chains

The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated existing fragilities in global value chains. Such weaknesses include micro, small, and medium enterprises without the cash reserves to endure the economic impact of lockdowns, and part-time workers without access to sick pay or social protection. Vulnerable workers whose health is at risk due to exposure to the virus, and those whose livelihoods are at risk because they depend on export sectors that have ground to a halt, need to be collectively addressed.

It is important to remember that much of the world’s financial system is broken, built to empower the wealthy and exploit the poor. There are more than 200 million underbanked or unbanked citizens within G7 alone—people who don’t have a bank account or people who have one, but still rely heavily on products like payday loans.

As we stand in November 2020, the global pandemic is far from over, and the consequences will be felt for many years to come. Global Citizen Capital and its ecosystem will continue to play its role in helping businesses to respond to threats, build trust, and connect partners for purposeful collaboration. It isinclusively purposeful and critically meaningful that we leverage the learnings and changes brought on by the pandemic to forge ahead into the Decade of Action to facilitate the betterment of millions of lives by 2030.