The Social Impact and Sustainability Imperatives Facing Leaders

Our Social Impact and Sustainability Focus Areas

We achieve our greatest societal impact in collaboration with our clients. By maximizing the impact of these cooperative efforts, we accomplish far more than we ever could alone. Partnership is at the heart of our social impact approach, and it is key to tackling complex social and environmental challenges. We seek to maximize our own social impact by enriching and expanding our partnerships, fostering system-level coalitions, and establishing social impact and sustainability as core competencies that are woven into business strategies and thus yield quantifiable returns.

Our social impact consulting drives major initiatives across a broad spectrum of global challenges to shape a better future. Our work is closely aligned with addressing and achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Examples of Our Social Impact Consulting

In this time of accelerating systematic change, customers, employees, and investors increasingly demand that organizations act in socially aware and sustainable ways and demonstrate that they are doing so. It is necessary, strategic, and profitable for organizations to have a positive social impact. We help organizations to plan, implement, assess, and communicate their social impact and sustainability initiatives. Examples of our social impact work include:

• Climate Change. BCG’s Center for Climate Action partnered with OGCI Climate Investments to maximize the impact of OGCI’s $1 billion climate fund.
• Economic Development. We joined forces with the Rwanda Development Board to help the country attract private investors to create new jobs. As a direct result, more than $130 million was invested and 9,000 jobs were created; an additional 20,000 jobs were created indirectly.
• Global Education. We supported the Indian state of Haryana as they quickly and sustainably boosted the quality of education for millions of students.
• Humanitarian Response. Collaborated with the World Economic Forum to develop an ecosystem for humanitarian and resilience investing, building an “opportunity platform” for tracking the size and nature of the humanitarian investing market. The platform already indicates thousands of projects in the works, collectively worth billions of dollars.
• Public Health. We created three principles to guide Africa’s COVID-19 response, based on our work supporting COVID-19 responses around the world and our broad range of support for governments in Africa.
• Sustainability. We partnered with Higg Co and Sustainable Apparel Coalition to create actionable guidance for fashion companies to accelerate their sustainability agendas, positioning themselves to be competitive in a post-pandemic market.

Transformative global change for the better is clearly possible. Driving such change is a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Companies can do well by doing good. For instance, biopharma companies that conduct ethical human clinical trials and expand access to medications have margins that are 6.7 percentage points higher, and valuations that are 12% greater, than the average for the industry.