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

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.