SDG Impulse

After 3 years of work within Escap's GT4, the Center of Social Economy is proud to present SDG Impulse, a digital tool for participative sustainability management anchored in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Through its slogan "Your Sustainability in Motion", the SDG Impulse project aims to offer a solution to the need to improve, raise awareness of and pass on SME sustainability practices.

Project description

The European Green Deal has led to a proliferation of environmental and social regulations within the European Union, notably with the launch of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Under this directive, which aims to broaden and improve extra-financial reporting by companies in the European Union, large companies and SMEs listed on the stock exchange will gradually be obliged to publish a sustainability report according to strict rules from 2025, unlike other SMEs. Nevertheless, the interconnections between SMEs and large companies also expose them to these new requirements, through a trickle-down effect.

In this rapidly developing regulatory context, and in response to the urgent need for companies to take greater account of sustainability issues, the SDG Impulse tool aims to fulfill four interconnected objectives:

1. To help SMEs establish an organizational diagnosis in terms of extra-financial performance,
2. Provide support to SMEs and their stakeholders in defining a sustainability strategy and monitoring it over time,
3. Facilitate extra-financial reporting by SMEs,
4. Promote interaction and exchange between SMEs committed to sustainability.

Key features

SDG Impulse was made possible thanks to the support of the Chaire-Eugénie Piedboeuf and the Walloon Region, which enabled CES to translate the concept developed within Escap's GT4 into a genuine management tool that can be activated by any SME wishing to commit to or strengthen its sustainability initiatives.

Thus, through the tool, SMEs engaged in an internal implementation of SDG Impulse will be able to :

• Understand how their company is already contributing to the SDGs,
• Develop a sustainability strategy based on the SDGs, in collaboration with their stakeholders,
• Use a digital platform to monitor the achievement of its objectives over time,
• Produce a sustainability report anchored in the SDGs, from a retrospective (achievements) and prospective (commitments) perspective,
• Exchange, draw inspiration and create partnerships with other players committed to sustainability,
• Contribute to the development of a structuring solution tailored to the needs of their company and region.

Start of the pilot phase

As SDG Impulse has now reached a sufficient stage of maturity, an initial pilot phase implementing the tool in 10 partner companies will begin in May 2024.

Through this pilot implementation, the selected SME candidates will benefit from privileged access to the digital platform hosting SDG Impulse and to the support of its team in order to strengthen the integration of sustainability issues raised by the SDGs in their business models. They will also play an active role in improving our solution-both digital and participatory-on the basis of their own experiments with the evaluation process proposed by SDG Impulse.

At the end of this pilot implementation, each participating SME will come up with a concrete sustainability strategy, preferably drawn up in close collaboration with its stakeholders, based on an initial organizational diagnosis. It will also have a sustainability report anchored in the SDGs, enabling it to formalize and publicly communicate its past contributions and future commitments to sustainability.