Millennium Fellowship conference on advancing multiple SDGs in Africa

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The world is tasked to achieve the sustainable development goals by 2030. These goals create a collective mission towards global well-being environmentally, socially, and economically. As this deadline approaches, there are few years to bring about transformational change. 

The Arizona State University (ASU) Millennium Fellows organised a conference to discuss how to create sustainable impacts with speakers from the business world. This conference took place on February 26, 2021, and February 27, 2021.

Robert Okine, the founder and CEO at Bewsys, was invited to share how Bewsys contributes to our future’s impact and sustainable development in advancing multiple SDGs in Africa through business and technology in bridging the inequality gap.

According to Robert, his childhood influenced the business that he is leading today. That is, growing up with a rich father and a poor mother in different households. This exposure made him understand wealth and poverty by helping him appreciate what is happening globally to bridge the inequality gap. Robert shared that inequality is why we have the 17 SDGs, and the goals are supposed to make the world a better place.

He explained the Bewsys way as believing every decision and action should bridge an inequality gap. Bewsys, in its ten years of existence, has been worked in 61 project countries across Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Oceania Regions. Out of all these undertaken projects, 16 SDGs have been touched on, impacting 50 million lives.

From our experience, most of the solutions we deploy for our partners are around social protection, focusing on SDG 1 and SDG 5. Robert shared how Bewsys developed a social protection digital solution that helped governments in Lesotho, Ghana, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to dispense financial and non-financial aid to their citizens who need it the most. 

The social protection solution was needed to save a fraction of the 71 million people who would have been pushed into extreme poverty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The reported cases of denying vulnerable populations relief financial and non-financial packages due to corruption were minimal. Digital solutions help money to reach the right people - those who need the money the most. 

Robert also shared projects we worked on in agriculture and regulatory systems. With our agriculture solutions, we mainly touch on SDG 9, SDG 16, and SDG 17. For regulatory system solutions, we focus on SDG 9, SDG 16 and SDG 17. 

Additionally, he shared how Bewsys is creating an impact through the education management solutions. 

"We know there is no way, even if we were doing CSR, we would be able to impact 50 million lives across the world. Hence we appreciate the indirect impact we have created to these many lives."

"Technology is only a transformational tool. The real impact is in the intentional commitment to using the tool to advance sustainable development. Business can use any resource or capacity to advance the SDGs if they are intentional about it."

Achieving such immense impact cannot be possible without private-public collaboration in developmental initiatives. It is difficult to make a social impact without partners to help one get there.  In support of that, Bewsys became a member of the UN Global Compact. This partnership allows us to shape our operations in light of sustainable development and network with other companies. 

In his conclusion, Robert urged the audience to invest in SDG learning to well-understand the need to achieve these goals.

Click here to watch the entire webinar. Robert speaks from 11:15 to 31:20.