Navigating the sustainable finance world

Now more than halfway through the Sustainable Finance Investing Project, I’ve had the privilege and opportunity to be deeply invested in my team’s ongoing efforts to identify new opportunities to foster peace and renewable energy in conflict-prone regions around the world. Having signed up for this class looking for a project that both stretched my research and analytic abilities and exposed me to a worthwhile organization, I can confidently say that my current project fulfills both. The unique intersection of security and finance perfectly aligns with my own experiences in international peace and capacity building, so being at the forefront of efforts to foster peace in insecure nations and regions through sustainable finance has been an extraordinary opportunity.

Our team approached our mission with both a singularity of purpose and a multitude of backgrounds, experiences, and expertise that has enabled us to consider our task at hand from a variety of angles. We began our research with a broad, global consideration of industries across the Global South that constituted both an outsized role in their respective nation’s economies and were marred by environmental, social, and supply chain risks to broader human rights and sustainability initiatives. Each taking our region of the world as our prerogative, we were able to identify three key industries that were both economically critical and primed for investment to improve their sustainability records. We achieved this through a broad yet detailed analysis of export data, economic prospectuses, and human rights reports about the industries in questions. 

Ultimately, our team selected mining, agriculture, and garments/apparel as the targets for our analysis. Moving forward, we plan to further analyze each of these key industries and select multinational companies that are engaged in these industries as targets for potential outreach. We are currently working on honing the exact criteria by which we will select these companies, developing a replicable, empirical process that incorporates feedback from our stakeholders and can be used indefinitely to benefit out partner organization long after our project concludes. Such a process will help aid this organization’s efforts to make lasting changes for sustainability and peace throughout their partner nations.

Working on this project has greatly deepened my knowledge of the tenets of successful consulting. Our weekly calls with our company contact have been extremely illustrative and helpful in clarifying our project objectives. One of the roadblocks we’ve had to overcome involves assigning team members to roles where their inherent skills and personalities are uplifted and rewarded. While there were some growing pains initially, we’ve since found a significantly more optimal work balance that allows everyone to both feel invested in the overall success of our project and ensure that we are uplifting a diversity of voices and lived experiences within our team. Overall, we are making excellent progress towards our endgoal, and my teammates have shown me the value of collaboration and how a team can be greater than the sum of its parts. The path forward is clear and bolstered by the strength of our team’s collaboration and unique skillsets, we look forward to delivering excellent results for our partner company and SIRI!