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Keeping Our Eyes on Our North Star: Building a Future of Resilience and Shared Prosperity Beyond 2030

2026-09-07 · By Zahid Torres-Rahman OBE, CEO, Business Fights Poverty

Business Fights Poverty CEO Zahid Torres-Rahman OBE argues that, as the 2030 horizon approaches, business needs to renew its shared vision for social impact. He calls for a future centred on resilience, shared prosperity and a healthy planet, with people’s lives, livelihoods and learning at the heart of business action.

As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. In true form, business leaders and social impact professionals are thinking creatively about how to remain ambitious amid crisis and constraint. New financing models. New AI tools. New partnerships. This has been the focus of much of our work over the past 12 months.

At the same time, there has been a concerted effort to embed societal impact at the core of business: better articulating and communicating its value. Our “5 Bridges to 2045” report brought together powerful strategies being employed, from better connecting teams to taking a more integrated approach to issues.

Meanwhile, advances in measurement, reporting and regulation, from TISFD to CSDDD, are providing a stronger underpinning for this work.

Done well, this should make business action more robust, accountable and grounded in commercial realities. This is good news, and perhaps the silver lining in the current context. We have been forced to think about how we do better.

Yet amid all this progress, something important may be slipping from view. With so much time and energy taken up with navigating political and economic headwinds and meeting new reporting and regulatory requirements, often in the context of downsized teams and budgets, have we taken our eyes off our North Star? Much of the conversation has shifted from creating value to protecting value. Both matter, but they are not the same thing.

The Sustainable Development Goals, and before them, the Millennium Development Goals, for all their weaknesses, provided something incredibly valuable: a shared, universal vision of the future we were trying to build. Today, the SDGs seem to have much less traction in many business conversations, and in any case, they will soon reach their 2030 horizon. Work is underway, including as part of the UN Pact for the Future and the call on countries to measure progress beyond GDP. But what, if anything, will provide the same sense of shared direction after 2030 remains an open question.

This matters. What will define the post-2030 agenda? The current focus on tactics, measurement and compliance is no substitute for a vision. What is our bigger why? And where are the opportunities for business to create value by helping solve the challenges that matter most? We need a positive, collective view of the future we want to build and of the role business can play alongside government and civil society.

This is not only about the SDGs approaching their 2030 horizon. The operating environment for business has also changed fundamentally. Climate instability, geopolitical fragmentation, fragile supply chains, disruptive technologies and constrained public finances are making uncertainty a structural condition rather than a temporary disruption. Businesses increasingly need to adapt, not simply optimise.

We have become much better at explaining why and how business should play a proactive role in driving progress, through the ways companies create, contribute and catalyse: creating value and opportunity through their core business, contributing beyond it, and catalysing wider systems change through advocacy and partnership. The challenge is not to reinvent the role of business, but to build on what we have learned and renew our shared vision of what business, in collaboration with others, can achieve in a radically changed context.

This leads to the question: what should this vision include, and who should be involved in defining it? We know that much of the language of sustainability and social impact has become technical, contested or disconnected from people’s everyday priorities.

The answer, in my view, lies in putting people right at the heart of what we are trying to do: improving the lives and livelihoods of individuals, and strengthening the resilience of local communities and the natural systems on which they depend. If we want that vision to mean something in practice, I find it useful to think about three simple lenses: lives, livelihoods and learning. Are people healthier, safer and more secure? Do they have access to decent and resilient livelihoods? And do they have the knowledge, skills and adaptability to navigate change?

Too often, approaches have been top-down, with outside experts defining priorities on people’s behalf. We need to turn this on its head: give people agency to identify and act on their own priorities and shape the decisions that affect their futures, and, as businesses, governments, civil society and other organisations, come together behind those locally defined aspirations.

This is one reason I regard Business Fights Poverty becoming an official business hub for the Poverty Stoplight, which we call Compass, as such an exciting step for us. Developed by Fundación Paraguaya, Compass is a practical tool that helps individuals and households identify their own priorities and track their progress, while giving organisations better insight into how they can support locally driven change.

What may be emerging is not another long list of goals, but a simpler shared destination: resilience and shared prosperity on a healthy planet. It is a future in which everyone has the opportunity to build a better life for themselves and their families, while safeguarding the natural systems on which that prosperity depends.

And getting there will require businesses themselves to work differently: to see differently by anticipating change and understanding interconnected systems; organise differently by working across traditional boundaries and building collective capability; and build differently by experimenting and creating resilient solutions that can evolve as circumstances change.

We also need to pay renewed attention to culture and values: the purpose, leadership and behaviours that shape the kind of businesses we want to build. Rules and reporting can establish important guardrails, but they cannot substitute for leadership.

Looking across two decades of Business Fights Poverty’s work, I find it useful to think of business action as being shaped by four interconnected drivers. Shared vision and opportunity. Measurement and reporting. Risk and compliance. Culture and values. All four matter, and they work best together. But right now, much of the energy is concentrated on measurement, reporting, risk and compliance. We need to restore the balance.

The point is not to dial back measurement, reporting or compliance. It is to put them in service of something bigger. What future are we trying to build together, and how can business help create it?

Over the coming months, Business Fights Poverty will be exploring what this emerging vision might mean in practice. What does a future of resilience and shared prosperity on a healthy planet look like from the perspective of people themselves? How can business create, contribute and catalyse? And what capabilities will companies need to navigate a world in which uncertainty is the norm?

Our Global Goals Summit 2026, taking place on 22 September in New York and online during UN General Assembly week and New York Climate Week, is an important part of that conversation. We’ll be exploring both the practical innovations helping businesses navigate today’s challenges and the bigger question of a renewed, shared vision for business beyond 2030, through a series of deep-dive, interactive sessions with leaders and practitioners from business, government and civil society.

The next chapter of business leadership will not be defined simply by better reporting or stronger compliance. It will be defined by whether we can renew a shared vision of the future, rooted in people’s aspirations, resilient communities and shared prosperity, and mobilise the distinctive capabilities of business to help create it.

If we can do that, the innovations we are seeing in finance, partnerships, technology and measurement become means to an end, rather than ends in themselves. And ultimately, progress should be judged where it matters most: in people’s lives.