-Lindsey Nefesh-Clarke is the founder of Women’s Worldwide Web – an online charitable organisation designed to help empower women with access to micro-finance loans, education, mentoring and networking. The opinions expressed are her own.-

“To reach a tipping point towards a new era of sustainability”: this is the urgent goal of the business, government and civil society leaders who convened in New York City for the recent U.N. Global Compact Leaders Summit.

In its effort to mobilize the global corporate community around the values and best practices of corporate responsibility, this gathering could not have been more timely.

The world is still suffering the fallout of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  In addition to wreaking far-reaching damage in high-income countries, the financial crisis has had an egregious effect on child and maternal health, gender equality, access to clean water, disease control, and hunger levels worldwide.

The World Bank estimates that there will be 53 million more people in extreme poverty in 2015 than there would have been had the financial crisis not occurred.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is battling the worst environmental disaster in its history.  In the wake of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon managed to strike an upbeat chord in his summit address, observing that “the business community is coming to understand that principles and profits are two sides of the same coin”.

The summit also saw the unveiling of a joint UNGC-Accenture survey of 1,000 CEOs (“the largest such study of CEOs ever conducted on the topic of sustainability”), which reports a “sea change” in attitudes.

Sustainability has evolved from being (as recently as 2007) a “peripheral” issue in business, to being “truly top- of-mind for CEOs around the world”.

The consensus is that business is on the cusp of a new era in which its primary objectives will be value creation (in terms of environment, governance and society) and profit optimization (rather than profit “maximization”).

The UNGC-Accenture report chimes with the optimism of business pundits who regard the financial crisis as a painful but salutary wake-up call, catalyzing the shift to a new paradigm of sustainability.

Out with “CSR-lite”, CSR as a philanthropic gesture.  In with ESG (environmental, social and governance) factors, comprehensively embedded in fresh business models and risk/reward structures.

In this new landscape, the leading global companies will be those offering a sustainable edge, providing goods and services and reaching new customers in ways that simultaneously address the world’s major challenges – including poverty, climate change, resource depletion, globalization and demographic shifts.

But will this mega-trend towards sustainability be sustained?

Since the BP oil spill began, the company, once lauded for its CSR, has seen a drop in its stock price of over 50 percent, been delisted from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and required to pay $20 billion in compensation and the company has undergone a customer rebranding—from Beyond Petroleum to “Big Polluter”.

Arguably, the current BP crisis, a disaster for all its stakeholders, could undermine the credibility of CSR by confirming “greenwash” sceptics’ criticisms of the disjuncture between the CSR industry and real-world business operations.

Or the catastrophe could, on the contrary, hammer home the increasing non-negotiability of CSR: in our information-driven society of digital media, companies face increasing demands of responsibility, transparency and accountability on all sides, from investors, employees, government agencies and prosumers who demand values-driven brands and will take companies to task if they default on their responsibilities.
The drive to push sustainability up the corporate agenda is real. A plethora of initiatives, at government, business and civil society levels, aims at fostering a culture of sustainability and translating policy and strategy into concrete practice. And these initiatives are not new. The Global Reporting Initiative’s sustainability reporting guidelines, for example, date back to 2000; since then, despite the global economic downturn, CSR reporting in accordance with the GRI framework has increased significantly.
But, while sustainability may be “top-of-mind” among CEOs, the real challenge is to push from strategy to implementation.  The UNGC-Accenture survey reports “a significant performance gap between what CEOs believe companies should be doing, and what they report on their own company’s performance.”

The report examines the internal and external challenges that companies face, including consumer attitudes, how to measure a new concept of value within organizations, and how to align market valuation of companies with sustainable business practices by engaging with investors on new terms.

“Business schools should be nervous…”

A propos of “performance gaps” and “new terms”, the UNGC-Accenture report highlights the need for a new generation of business leaders and business education. Official UNGC Summit bloggers commenting on the UN PRME (Principles of Responsible Management Education)  assert, however, that “business schools are still largely operating within an agency-, efficient markets- and shareholder value-framework.”

In an article entitled “Business Schools Should Be Nervous,” they warn that business may look for other sources of education if business schools fail to respond to the changing imperatives of business.  CSR and sustainable leadership principles are not adequately integrated across the curriculum: “This applies certainly to many of the top North American and European schools. And … this thinking is still dominating our research by and large – and today’s research is the teaching material ten years from now ».

Fortunately, business schools are in the process of reorienting themselves and further incorporate issues of sustainability and corporate citizenship into business management education. “Responsible Management in a World of Transition” was the theme of this year’s International Deans and Directors conference in Berlin, organized by AMBA (the Association of MBAs, which accredits MBAs). Academics and business practitioners came together from around the world to exchange ideas about how to ensure the relevance of business education in light of both current and imminent socioeconomic, environmental and demographic challenges.

Business education can decisively influence the global business landscape in coming years. It must not only adapt to the changing world of business, but rather take the lead in helping businesses and investors to transition to a culture of responsibility and sustainability.

Business school curricula can bring in real world cases or, better still, venture out into the real world and help businesses to adopt a broader stakeholder perspective.  Business schools can communicate the value of CSR, its tangible risks and tangible opportunities.

They can help companies integrate systems that measure CSR impact (qualitatively and quantitatively) and help implement performance metrics that go beyond earnings per share to include environmental and social factors.  Business education can help businesses to go beyond damage control and compliance in internalizing externalities, seizing sustainable business as a business opportunity.

It can help to bridge communication gaps both within companies and between companies and their investors, allowing sustainability activity to be incorporated into valuations by investors and analysts.

In February this year the World Business Council for Sustainable Development issued its report “VISION 2050: the new agenda for business” stating that the report’s “highest value may be in its narrative of the gap between Vision 2050 and a business-as-usual world…”.

The report urgently insists that a sustainable future will require smarter systems, smarter people, smarter designs and smarter businesses.

Business schools must rise to this challenge.  They are, or should be, uniquely positioned to help the business world, and the rest of us, to walk the sustainable talk.

Photo Credit: Sarah Tegtmeier, with Tri-State Bird Rescue & Research, lifts a sheet to show the assembled media a brown pelican covered with oil sheen at the Pensacola Oiled Wildlife Rehabilitation Facility in Pensacola, Florida, June 29, 2010. REUTERS/Lyle W. Ratliff

- Lindsey Nefesh-Clarke is the founder of Women’s Worldwide Web – an online charitable organisation designed to help empower women with access to micro-finance loans, education, mentoring and networking. She has an MBA from ESCP Europe Business School and is a Board Director of Enfants d’Asie. The opinions expressed are her own. Reuters will host a “follow-the-sun” live blog on Monday, March 8, 2010, International Women’s Day. Please tune in

As an educated European woman enjoying a fulfilling career, along with the majority of my female and male peers, the “angel in the house” curse and the “feminine mystique” malaise seem, in many ways, to have faded into history.

My peers and I can read the inspiring headlines “We did it” , knowing that women will soon constitute the majority of the U.S. workforce, knowing that there are nowadays more female than male university graduates in the U.S. and Europe, and that an increasing number of high-profile female role models are heading some of the world’s leading companies.

The courageous feminist struggles of our foremothers are not to be forgotten.  But, in our new, post-industrial world, haven’t most of the critical legal and social battles for women like me been won?  Isn’t it self-indulgent to bash on about the need to persist in the struggle for women’s empowerment and gender equality when my ostensible juggling act is to type a memo on my BlackBerry with one hand and operate the microwave with the other?

This International Women’s Day, I will be celebrating the heroism, resilience, resourcefulness, creativity and achievements of women worldwide, today and throughout history.  Progress in women’s socioeconomic status over the past century has been monumental.

And yet, as we assess the hard-won accomplishments of women around the globe, one year before the centenary of International Women’s Day and following the 30th anniversary of the landmark Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women, I can’t help asking whether this year’s International Women’s Day is less a cause for celebration and more a moment for sadness and acute concern.

Some facts: approximately 1.3 billion people live in absolute poverty and the majority of them are women; women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours but earn only one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than one-tenth of the world’s property ; nearly a billion people in the world are illiterate and two thirds of them are women; it is estimated that a woman dies every minute as a result of problems in pregnancy and childbirth, mostly in the global South, and the vast majority are preventable; one in three women worldwide is beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused ; it is estimated that 100 million females are missing from the planet as a result of sex-selective abortion, discriminatory nutrition and health care in childhood and routine violence against women, a “gendercide” that « far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century » .

These statistics are mind-numbing.  Heartbreaking, if you allow even a touch of the reality of the lives behind the numbers to unfurl.

Violence against women, the violation of women’s rights and the egregious disparity between women’s “paper rights” and women’s rights in practice are all pandemic.  Cutting across boundaries of age, race, culture, wealth and geography, these are global problems—not confined to far-off “underdeveloped” and “developing” countries.  They blight even the doorsteps of middle and high-income countries, which suffer some of the highest rates of violence against women .

Of course, relative to our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers, women in the rich world have unprecedented opportunities and freedoms.  But even here, at home in my high-income country, the picture is not all rosy. Women still earn substantially less than men, on average.

Women are still severely underrepresented in senior managerial positions and public office .  And there is the perennial, arduous struggle to reconcile work and family life (not least because women’s needs in this respect are mediated through structures that allow too few women to participate in the decision-making).  The glass ceiling remains overhead, stubbornly unshatterable by all but a select few.

International Women’s Day should mark an urgent renewal of our collective resolve.  Men and women everywhere, from the grassroots to the international level, can work to put an end to violations of women’s human rights and to improve the global status of women, continuing our efforts to achieve women’s social, economic and political empowerment and parity.

This is not only an end in itself: it is acknowledged that achieving the Millennium Development Goals depends upon it, it makes smart business and economic sense , that women’s empowerment undermines extremism and terrorism and will strengthen the global fight against climate change .

There are multiple feminisms at work in the world, and obviously the needs and aspirations of women differ, often radically, from one context to another.  But we share a common need to create the conditions whereby women everywhere can be safe, can exercise their rights, act as creative agents, determine their lives and fulfil their potential.  In civil society, in business, and at local, national and international governmental levels, powerful initiatives are being taken to achieve this.

Between us, we can and must: facilitate girls’ and women’s education; promote inclusive finance to give women the financial opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty; lobby and advocate to end the violations of women’s rights; make rigorous policy to create the legal frameworks for women’s empowerment; find the political will to translate those legal rights into practice; break ground with new business programmes for women; and participate in women’s mentoring and leadership schemes.

Ours is an astonishingly and increasingly interconnected world: riddled with information and communication technologies that our grandmothers could not have dreamed of. These technologies have unprecedented potential when it comes to raising awareness, collaborating and mobilizing support and resources to bridge the gender divide .

The “Grameen telephone ladies” in rural Bangladesh, Rwandan women weaving baskets and selling their products online, the telecommuting urban mom on Twitter: women are less and less “worlds apart…”.

On International Women’s Day, we can celebrate the triumphs of countless everyday heroines, awe-inspiring women who are creatively and courageously making progress in all aspects of social, political and economic life, all around the world—often, against all odds.

The day is also a reminder of the urgent need for global collective action in asserting women’s rights and working to achieve gender equality. Energized and enabled by what has already been achieved, we need to go further in enhancing the safety and status of women.  Women everywhere need to be free to exercise their vast potential, if we are to make a fairer, better world.