Two MBA students had the honor to participate in the <link https: www.unglobalcompact.org take-action events>UN Global Compact Leaders Summit 2016 from June 22nd to June 23rd. Yousra Emara and Steffen Linsenbolz, both 4th semester MBA students, together with Prof. Dr. Rudi Kurz and Bachelor students Sarah Domdey (Business Administration/Controlling, Finance & Accounting) and Sinah Asong (Business Administration and Engineering / International Management) from Pforzheim University, spent some exciting days in New York City.

The whole experience of visiting the USA and being at the United Nations headquarters for the first time was exquisite. The <link https: www.unglobalcompact.org take-action events>UN Global Compact (UNGC) is an organisation of the <link http: www.un.org>United Nations (UN) that works to encourage businesses worldwide to adopt sustainable work practices and to integrate the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In 2015, the United Nations adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be implemented worldwide by the end of 2030. SDGs are very promising yet challenging including goals like ending worldwide poverty and hunger, expanding renewable energies, ensuring equitable quality education and gender equality. The challenging goals require the United Nations to call the private sector to participate and play a vital role in achieving these goals.

As MBA students and future business executives, a lot of support is needed for the SDGs to be adopted and implemented in our future business practices. Pforzheim University is part of the <link http: www.unprme.org>UN Prime (PRME), which stands for Principles for Responsible Management Education, and is similar to the UN Global Compact as it targets to establish the 17 SDG’s already in the education of the future leaders.

The first day of the UNGC Leaders Summit took place at the UN headquarters and included speeches of guests from various backgrounds and countries. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN and Lise Kingo, Executive Director of the UN Global Compact, opened the event. The theme of the summit was changing the mind-set.

The second day took place at the Marriott Marquis hotel at Times Square. It was very insightful as we attended speeches of different speakers discussing the current and future challenges, the ways to achieve the goals, and further steps in the future. One of the sessions was about discussing the world’s greatest current challenge, to achieve worldwide peace.  Terrorism, its impact and steps to face it, were also discussed. As an industry example: Deutsche Telekom AG mentioned that they offer free WIFI to refugees to support their application process and language learning as well as they acquire specifically refugees for special apprenticeships.

On the day after the summit, international students, including all participants of Pforzheim University, were invited to Fordham University to reflect on their feedback from the summit. The sustainability of businesses nowadays is one of the challenging topics that still not all the companies are implementing. It was agreed on, that we first need to start with communicating and educating others about the goals and their vital impact on the current and future generations. There needs still a lot to be done in the area and during the summit many opportunities were discussed.

We all concluded that the world is on the right track, but like Jan Eliasson, Deputy Secretary-General of the UN, closed the summit: “There is still a lot to do, let’s go to work!”.

Text by Steffen Linsenbolz and Yousra Emara