Influencing Change in Children who live in countries succeptible to and suffering from the effects of Climate Change
1 billion children (nearly half the world’s 2.2 billion children) live in countries most susceptible to and suffering from the effects of climate change.
160 million children are in child labor globally.
This is just a few metrics Matt Goodwin at Global Child Forum seeks to change to improve the lives of children around the world.
Their ranking of the 2,000 most influential companies scores each against various criteria for how their practices, products, and their entire value chain impact children.
Global Child Forum was spearheaded by the royal family in Sweden in 2009. The annual business benchmark is conducted by the Boston Consulting Group.
How do they influence change?
• Peer pressure – publishing the top companies’ scores and showing how they rank compared to their peers.
• Educate business leaders on how to improve their score
• Sharing the world’s largest data set on how companies impact children and encourage investors to incorporate it into their investment practices.
Explore the annual benchmarks: https://lnkd.in/gtRGSR7J
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] Welcome to Impact Stories. I’m here with Matthew Goodwin with Global Child Forum, please introduce yourself.
Matthew: Hi, Jacob delighted to be with you today and very excited about this. My name is Matt Goodwin. I’m head of sustainable investing at Global Child Forum. We are a royal Swedish children’s rights organization based in Stockholm. We were founded by the Royal family in 2009 and what we try to do is drive impact at scale for children globally. And the mechanism for this is business. We believe that if we can get one big global company to really consider its positive and negative impacts on children and see children as stakeholders, we can impact the lives of children all over the world.
So we can improve lives for parents of children who have more time to look after their children and be present for them, which is obviously fundamentally important. We can improve lives for children living in local and global communities. We can improve the impact businesses have on the environment, which children obviously need. We can improve the products that companies sell [00:01:00] in terms of their impact on mental health; and their impact on children’s wellbeing and health and safety. We can improve the way businesses advertise.
I mean, there are 160 million children working in child labor conditions around the world. If we can improve all of this for one big global company, imagine what we can do for the 2000 that we work with. We really believe that our potential impact is almost unlimited. And the reach and impact we can have for all these children globally is huge. So you can imagine how excited I am about the job that we have here. That’s what Global Children’s Forum does at a very high level.
Jacob: How does one go about getting that job? That seems like a really unique position.
Matthew: I wish I had a really cool story for you that inspired me to get into this space. The reality is it was a long grinding process of realizing when I worked for a bank in London for 10 years that I wanted to do more. That I wanted to have a job that gave back that helped people and children are obviously such a natural part of society.
I guess it was a chance of fate that my family took a bit of a gamble during [00:02:00] COVID and we moved from London to Stockholm and Global Child Forum were looking for someone with my skill set, and that’s history. But we are luckily very well supported by the Swedish Royal family here.
We’re based in the palace in the old town in Stockholm. We do some great things with them and it’s a really exciting job.
Jacob: Tell me more about how the mechanism works for working with companies. I think you’ve made a good point, if you can get Nestle to shift their practices, that affects thousands or millions of people, with one business. What’s the mechanism to encourage those companies to actually make those shifts that are going to have a positive impact on children’s lives?
Matthew: Obviously it’s not easy to get business to change, but we operate on three basic levels. The starting point is a benchmark. So every year we do a benchmark on the 2000 biggest companies in the world. And we do this in collaboration with our pro bono partners, Boston Consulting Group.
And our benchmark looks at all the areas that business can impact children. And it derives from the Children’s Rights and Business Principles, which is a founding children’s rights in [00:03:00] business document written by a collection of UN agencies. We benchmark these companies and give them all a score.
We then share these scores with the companies. And at a sort of starting point, we hope that telling companies how they’ve done, highlighting them compared to others, is a starting point for saying, this is your score, a little bit of peer pressure, we hope you improve. So that’s level one.
Level two is that we then offer a whole range of currently free tool services, networking events, forums for head sustainability CEOs to attend to learn more about the issues. We do loads of case studies. We really try and have a community in which businesses can learn from those who are doing well in the space.
And the third bit, which I’ve been responsible for is through doing all of this work, we’ve collected a whole range of data on companies globally. And what we’ve done is we’ve turned this into the world’s biggest data set on how companies impact children and we’ve been sharing it with the financial sector globally and getting them to incorporate our data into investment practices, which they’re already doing with all sorts of other ESG [00:04:00] data, and in their stewardship activities. So, today we have investors with a combined value of 8 trillion U.S. Dollars under management using our data. But obviously we want that number to grow.
Jacob: Give me a case study or an example of how shining a light on and benchmarking and having the positive peer pressure has actually led to positive change.
Matthew: There are all sorts of examples and we benchmarked 2000 companies. So there’s lots of stuff going on. I think an example that we’ve seen are large agricultural organizations, particularly in Southeast Asia. What they’ve identified is that their farms, their plantations are based quite a long way from where their employees live. And so the employees’ children then have to stay with elderly grandparents and not be with the parents or the parents are unable to work on the plantations.
So, what we’ve done is we’ve worked with some organizations to actually build communities on the plantations, on the farms so that the children can go to school, can live with the parents who are working. So the parents still get a salary, [00:05:00] the children stay with their parents, and the children keep their education going.
Whereas previously, one or two of those things had to stop. Now there are all sorts of things, and what we can do is share some examples of these as case studies, maybe on the links under LinkedIn and we can give you some really concrete things, but that’s just one example of things that we’ve seen.
Jacob: What is it that you are most looking for right now? Are you looking for companies to sign up, and be willing to be benchmarked? Are you trying to fundraise, or rally support around certain causes? Maybe particularly in your role, what is it that you most are looking for?
Matthew: I run the kind of financial sector work program that the organization does. I think broadly speaking as an organization, you mentioned this beautifully, we are a not for profit, so we’re always looking for funding. If there’s anyone listening who believes in what we do, hello, please reach out.
Other than that in October this year, so very shortly, we will be publishing our 2024 report. We would love people to engage in the report, to look at what’s going well, what’s not going badly, to look at company scores. Whether we benchmark you or not, it’s a [00:06:00] really interesting document and shed some light on some really important issues.
And thirdly, we’re really looking to build partnerships. If we benchmark a company, we really want to build relationships with them. You can find out if you’re benchmarked by going on our website, which we can again share in the links. We want to build partnerships with investors who really believe in children’s rights and using the power of their investments to drive change.
We really will speak to anybody. So any friend, any ally who wants to drive this and wants to collaborate with us, please do reach out. If you’re based in the Nordics, we’d love to have a coffee in person, but we do travel to the UK and the US quite a lot. So in person, webinar, we’d love to see what we can do together to drive this really important issue.
Jacob: If I’m an impact investor or an asset manager or anyone in this kind of space, How would you advise them to use the report? What utility can it provide for them?
Matthew: Most investors today have pretty good pretty advanced mechanisms for looking at the environment, but most don’t really look at children’s rights outside [00:07:00] of child labor, which is a regulatory requirement in most areas. But what they’re probably not looking at are areas like the marketplace, which is how companies design, develop, advertise products or services, whether directly or indirectly to children. And that has a massive impact. So read our report, really understand where these strengths and weaknesses are. What we’ve done with other investors is share the underlying benchmark data.
So you can then really see for yourselves what the weaknesses and strengths of your overall portfolio are. And then we can help you develop stewardship, initiatives or to use the data, to really help improve these areas or minimize some of your own risks, because ultimately there are children’s rights risks inherent in some of these issues.
There’s lots of external stakeholder pressure on companies today to do the right thing in terms of giving children healthy food, giving children social media platforms that don’t harm their mental health. We can help you do the right thing and mitigate some of this risk as well as doing the right thing.
Jacob: As you’ve been on this journey of yours, what things have you been most surprised to find out, [00:08:00] as it relates to child well being and what have you? What things you know were surprises for you?
Matthew: Whoa. I mean, That’s a really good question. From the perspective of someone who worked from a bank, the complete breadth of impact that businesses have on children was surprising to me. And this is, I think, a position that many of us find ourselves in, is that we automatically think of child labor.
But there are all sorts of other areas which I’ve alluded to earlier on. But also perhaps looking a little bit into the science, which please don’t ask me about because I can’t quote anything, but about the vulnerabilities of children and the help that they really need and how this is such an important social group for the future of our society, for the future of mankind, for the future of dealing with some of the massive issues that we have to deal with, like sustainability and the planet, et cetera. But really getting a bit of an understanding about how that all works together, for me, was probably the biggest surprise. But even some basic facts like 160 million children work in child labour across the globe. That’s shocking, right? I’ve been surprised on many levels
Jacob: Any other stats like that, that have opened other people’s [00:09:00] eyes or kind of jump out at you?
Matthew: Off the top of my head, really basic things. 33 percent of the global population of children, which is a whacking great number. So when you put it into that kind of perspective, you go, wow, this is a group we really need to think about and protect. And it’s amazing that so many of us don’t go about our daily professional lives thinking that this is such an important group.
Now, we hear lots of talk from businesses and investors about protecting vulnerable groups. And we hear about aboriginal groups, et cetera, et cetera, which are all obviously very important groups to protect, but children make up a third of the global population and often they are forgotten about when we’re having these kinds of conversations. That blew my mind when I started in this area of work and read stuff like that. I also read an interesting stat recently, which maybe don’t quote me on, but I think it said that half of that third of children live in the 25 countries most affected by climate change.
And obviously those countries have contributed very little to climate change. So, the impact of increased heat on children and their bodies, but also [00:10:00] the disruption that’s going to happen to food sources, to infrastructure, and the further difficulties that are going to be placed on those children.
To survive as they grow older is really quite amazing. But I’ve stolen that stat from a UNICEF paper that I’ve read recently.
Jacob: There’s a number of other groups like UNICEF that are trying to help give children a voice, how do you work with those? Or What gap are you filling that isn’t being filled in these other groups?
Matthew: Good question. The King and Queen of Sweden have set up a number of different children’s rights charities as part of their reign. Children and their rights have been the focus. What we do that most organizations don’t is focus purely on business. That’s kind of our niche. Now, there are parts of UNICEF and Save the Children that do look at these areas, too, and we work very closely with them.
In fact, in October this year, the King and Queen of Sweden in the palace are hosting the world’s largest multi-stakeholder gathering of business leaders, government officials, children’s rights experts and we are doing it in [00:11:00] collaboration with UNICEF and Save the Children. Where we can, we try to partner with these organizations who are obviously also doing a really amazing job.
Jacob: How do you respond to someone that maybe has the assumption that this is just an emerging market issue? You know, that children’s rights are really just for developing countries where child labor is a bigger issue? How would you refute some of those thoughts?
Matthew: There’s a little bit of a complicated answer to this in that because we’re dealing with the world’s biggest companies, they tend not to be based in developing markets. They tend to be based in London and New York and Paris and Sydney and obviously there’s a global spread. But the tentacles of their supply chains are all over the world. You know, whether it’s their own operations or the operations of a company that they supply for whatever tier of the supply chain that is.
So it doesn’t really matter where, if we’re talking about child labor, it’s based, these big companies have an influence to stop it, but that’s just obviously child labor. Otherwise some of the issues I mentioned before about, you know, how companies design, develop and [00:12:00] advertise their products.
I mean, that is as relevant in a market like the U.S. or in the UK or parts of Europe as it is anywhere else in the world. There are different dynamics to this and obviously different countries have different issues, but business has a role to play in improving the lives of children in many, many ways in many, many countries. And so I think there’s a lot to be done in every country and by every business. Hopefully, we’re making some progress towards that.
Jacob: What’s your vision for where you want to see this go? When do you know you’ve accomplished it? What does that end goal look like?
Matthew: I suppose what any charity would tell you is that they want to become a stranded asset, to use a financial term when all businesses consider children’s rights in the same way that they consider sustainability today, or you could argue they don’t consider sustainability anywhere near enough. But when we’re not needed. But I can’t see there being a point at least in the foreseeable future when businesses don’t need to be held to account for this. That’s the vision, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near there quite yet.
Jacob: If you had an invitation to the [00:13:00] business community, if you’d piqued their interest, how can they participate, or what are the different levels of engagement with your organization?
Matthew: If we benchmark you, we absolutely would love to speak to you. But if you find this is an interesting topic and you want to collaborate with us or speak to us, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. But please just reach out to us.
If we benchmark you, you can see your scores on the website. And we have a really quite cool comprehensive website too, so, please check that out. We have an organizational LinkedIn profile, so please follow us. We’ve got some really cool research and tools that we share on that. But yeah, check out our website, and reach out to me.
Jacob: Are you benchmarking any size of organization or just Fortune 100s? What sort of is the criteria to be benchmarked?
Matthew: There’s an organization called the World Benchmarking Alliance and what they’ve done is they’ve built a list called the World Benchmarking Alliance SDG 2000. And this is a list of the most influential companies in the world and the companies that need to change if we have any chance of hitting the Sustainable Development Goals.
So [00:14:00] lots of NGOs like ourselves who do benchmarking, benchmark this list. So if you’re on that list, we benchmark you. Whether you want to be benchmarked or not, we benchmark you. There’s about a 5% turnover every year as companies merge or new tech companies climb into the list, but maybe we can share a link to that list as well.
Jacob: Any last words before I let you go? Anything you’d like to share?
Matthew: I’d reiterate that this is a hugely important topic. We’d love to hear from people, partner with people, et cetera. But also I’d like to thank you for having me on. It’s been nice to catch up with you after we met at the GIIN conference and let’s keep in touch ourselves, but thank you so much for having me.
Jacob: Thank you. And keep up the good work that you’re doing and applaud your efforts. And maybe one day you become irrelevant, you know, that there isn’t a need, but short of that, that we can help rally more to the cause and bring a greater awareness to the work that you’re doing.
Matthew: Yeah, thank you.
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