April 13, 2016
Make the SDGs a road from war to prosperity

Tonye Cole, Co-Founder and Group CEO, Sahara Group

My earliest recollection is of a road trip and of a house with a long corridor that I used to run down, a bunker that people were hurled into, shouting and screaming and scrambling. A place with loud banging explosions all around. I should not remember these things because they occurred when I was between the ages of two and three, but I do remember them. I was a child of war, born into the midst of a very brutal civil war in my home country of Nigeria. It's no wonder that the trauma the pain and human suffering unleashed in those years would find a way to imprint itself permanently in my subconscious.

I later learned that that road trip was really my mother and her family fleeing to our hometown. In doing so, they, like many families of our time, lost everything. They had to start from zero when the war ended. It has been nearly half a century since this event occurred. The memory, the effects, still linger in the hearts and minds of the people who lived through it and the consequences, even after so long, are seen in politics, in the way the tribes relate to each other, and the way that people talk and act even 50 years later. 

Extreme circumstances like war, like poverty, have the capacity to inflict very deep psychological scars on those who lived through them. These hardships, of being displaced from home, from family, from countries, are the things that the UN sees every day. The list of human atrocities is endless. The suffering is endless. My family lost everything in terms of land and property, home, business assets. Poverty beckoned very strongly. 

But for some basic tenants of life, I don't think we would have escaped poverty. My grandparents had a strong moral character that was infused in them and the children that they bore. This unit saw us rise out of the ashes to where we are today and it's our responsibility to provide the same for every human being as much as we can. The thought is never far from my mind, that if I can live through a war, build a successful business, and make it as far as I have in life today, anyone can.

The dynamics of providing solutions for the world's biggest problems has moved from the realm in which the expectation is that the government has to do it all. It's moved from the expectation that the multilateral agencies like the UN have the responsibility to do it all. It has now moved to one of inclusiveness where all stakeholders have a role to play in solving the problem. Industrialization forms the nucleus for why the UN is today seeking to partner with the private sector in providing sustainable solutions for the world's deepest challenges as listed in the 17 SDGs. Working with the SDG Fund, as part of its Private Sector Advisory Group, has afforded me the insight to see just how far the human spirit is able to adapt when it is really is determined to make a change.

Both of us, the UN and the private sector, come with our positives and negatives. We must be willing to listen to each other. We must be patient in building trust with each other. We must understand what is important to each other. We must be prepared to adopt the positive attributes that we bring and always remain focused on the one real reason why a nuptial knot was tied.

Sahara Group and the SDG-F have collaborated in developing a model concept, which we call Food Africa. It is targeted at preserving the value lost in post-harvest losses. 40 to 60% of food is lost and we are finding a way to pass that benefit back to the farmers by using the best of both worlds, the private sector’s ability to seek out opportunities which exist in any supply chain to create sustainable value addition for partners as well as the UN's vast mobilization mechanisms in galvanizing cooperation amongst multiple stakeholders.

Poverty is something that no human being should be made to go through and its eradication is a task that all of us must embrace. The task of Zero Poverty is audacious, it’s bold, it's daunting and it is a task that has capacity to challenge the mind in ways that we have not even begun to think about.

This article is an edited and shortened version of Tonye Cole remarks in the launch of the report ‘Business and the United Nations: Working Together towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Framework for Action”