Hi, I'm Juliana Titu. I am the CEO and co-founder of SDG monitor set monitor is a cloud based tool that helps companies and organizations in measuring their sustainability performance and uh communicating it transparently.You can see the links there and I would love to connect with you on linkedin. There is also link to my profile there. I really hope that you have been enjoying this inspiring talk so far today, helped by very many talented women and men in technology and I want to know warmly, welcome you to my session. As today is all about inspiring. I would like to start by providing you with some context uh of my sustainability journey. And how is the T monitor first saw light? This is my place for inspiration and motivation. It was in summer 2019 when I went to spend my summer vacation in Finland from Paris uh where I lived at that time on our family owned island um at the Botany Sea. It's located in the archipelago of the western part of Finland. This small island has a wooden cottage built by my dad. Solar panels that can generate just enough energy needed for lighting the lead bulbs, there's no running water and fire food to heat the sauna before dipping into the Ice Cold Sea.

If you have visited Finland, you know how it is. Well, this place is surrounded by the nature's renewable assets and it's very, very close to my heart. It has taught me to live sustainably and also to influence others to do the same. But I'm worried, I worried if this place will still exist in 50 or 100 years from now or if the effects of the warming climate that causes sea level rise and more dangerous storms are going to wash out the favorite place for me in the world, the climate change effects can be much felt already in the northern part of the world.

You also might have felt the impact where you are living in. It's clear that action needs to be taken and as individuals, as well as businesses, we have an important role in making this difference happen. Businesses especially needs to start developing their practices to be more sustainable and go from the business as usual business model to sustainable business, one action at a time. So one evening I received an email, it was the last reminder to register for Cambridge University's Visa sustainability management course.

But I have been considering if that is worth it or not. Um And it's quite funny that I signed up for it in this place without knowing how that would change the course of my professional and personal life in the most exciting place. So I virtually met my current business partner on that course, online, we realized that we had a common interest to new business development. And then COVID-19 pandemic started, well, that actually didn't slow us down. We took it as an opportunity. We developed the SCG monitor in nine months from an idea to mock up to wire frames. Well, several rounds of wire frames, you know how that works, too ready to use SAS product into the B to B market. And we did all that in an all remote working environment, working from different countries around the world with our web developers and graphic designer in Zoom meetings and the founder, founder team met only two times face to face before launching our tool in November last year.

And the learning from this is that I believe in consistent action and consistent work always pays off. OK. So here we are six months later, my job is to help companies and organizations to measure their social stability performance and show its environmental, social and governance impact.

This is gonna be the action needs to be concrete and measurable in order to manage and follow up them efficiently. And here we need data that's up to date, trustworthy and communicated within the business and amongst the stakeholders. So now I finally come to my topic, how sustainability data United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and measuring performance interconnect. And why communicating transparently is truly a must first imagine that you have created a project plan to the tiniest detail with the target timeline and schedule when and what actions need to be done. Well, then it's less unmonitored while still awaiting for super great results.

Yeah, this happens too often for different projects that we know what we should do, but then we fail to do it. So why a project is not executed? There are three reasons that I give you. There's not enough resources, there is lack of communication. The project goals are not communicated within the business and there is not, they don't know where the data is coming from. Data is never the issue but choosing the right KPIS are especially when you talk about sustainability. So as any other project, sustainability also needs to be managed today, many companies and organizations they are today creating sustainability action plans. And as we like to put it an a a plan helps them to grow their business and enhance social well being without harming the environment, these plans then include their est actions, environmental social and governance actions where each action needs a target and a time frame. Are they short or long term targets? And A KP I, so what's the quantifiable measure for that action under data source? Where is data coming from? Who is responsible of that action? So what's sustainability performance? Then if we look at conference dictionaries uh dictionary.

Performance means the act of doing something such as your job and performance also refers to how well an activity or job is done. So, performances, actions and activities and for businesses, this means executing their sustainability action plans and showing their progress towards their set targets.

So what does performance look like? I said, action and performance goes hand in hand and progress of an action is not always linear. But when you finally reach your goal, let's say your goal was to increase the share of women in Mandar positions of your company, then your new target becomes to maintain that reach goal. So measure renting sustainability means quantifying those concrete actions. Also those that have a social impact, for example, increasing diversity and gender equality in a company that can be measured as a share of women in a company monitoring the increasing trend or environmental impact action. For example, uh let's say decreasing the generation of digital ways and you can measure this with the with the with gigabytes or terabytes or governance impact actions such as increasing the availability and resources of timing and reliable data. The performance measurement requires a lot of consistency companies to measure the performance and communicate it to avoid crewing those false promises. And speaking before doing the sustainability data, the companies disclose is very valuable for all clients, suppliers, investors, owners, employees showing the performance companies make themselves accountable and increase transparency by practicing what they preach and making it easier for investors also to create their ec assess assessments of them.

Now if I'm making sense, give me some sign in the chat so that I know you are still on the map with me. The so often sustainability A CSA plans are integrated into a well known global framework such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that companies are increasingly supporting these cities. They are in the core of agenda 2030. It was signed in New York 2015 and buying 100 and 93 member states of the United Nations. The SDTS that we believe is the most comprehensive framework used as a tool to measure. Also the steps towards Paris Agreement. These SDGS provides a universal language of aspects in sustainable development, all aspects and these 17 goals can be broken down into targets and indicators. They also take into account environmental, social and governance matters and companies are the ones who are realizing these goals.

So now we want to give a few examples how an information technology and services or IOT or application company can contribute to S TT S. So you can target these hot est challenges of your industry. Let's take SDT for the fast digitalization. You want to increase youth and adults with IC T skills. These are the future of work skills set five tackling gender bias in technology and uh also the tackling the lack of recognition of women in tech jobs. You want to increase gender equality and women and girls empowerment and also diversity in the tech tech jobs. S TT seven information technologies and variant energy consuming industry. So you want to minimize your carbon footprint by shifting from fossil based energy to renewable energies.

Set 12 digital product development. That optimization don't develop something that no one is using and optimize energy use. It will reduce digital waste and e waste as well. Finally use the technology peak data in order to increase tools that can measure sustainability actions and help to get more timely data. So up to date daily data, it's something that investors third party assessment companies, banks among others are talking about. So everybody are increasingly interested in the data companies disclosed on their environmental social and governance actions. Data has a pretty key role in managing business sustainability as we can only manage something that we can measure. Good example is annual reporting.

So annual reporting without presenting quantitative est impacts totally not enough anymore. We need more daily weekly monitoring of their sustainability activist activities and clearly presenting their actual performance. The key is to fully embed actions into daily activities and having a clarity who is responsible in the company of those actions here, KPIS can help you to evaluate success at reaching your docs in a more general angle. Sustainability management requires standardization and industry based KPIS for getting more trustworthy data. We need it making comparisons between companies helping investors to better assess their portfolio companies est impacts and also understanding business benefits because sustainability for a business can increase their profits and create competitive edge.

It leads to cost savings because you are generating less waste, for example. And you have minimized your stranded assets like during the time of COVID companies have given up, given out their offices as a stranded asset because everybody are working from anywhere. Also social can build your stro build a stronger brand image. You can be a better employer and you can attract the best talent, talents to your, to your uh business because we people we want to feel being part of something that has a purpose. So you want to be that company who is providing it and also trust through transparent communication with stakeholders. OK. Here efforts are already being done. For example, in the European Union through eu taxonomy that is helping to aim create a common language and definition for what's sustainable.

This is a very important thing and making a list of activities that companies investors policymakers do and can be considered as environmentally sustainable. The eu taxonomy's goal is to help achieve the green deal energy efficiency targets and all this this person needs more data sharing.

So how can we communicate and follow up sustainability performance in real time? I want to visualize this to you by taking women text global conference that we are here today. Their 10 year goal is to inspire 1 million women in technology by 2030. And I will take this action and present it its performance using our cloud based to start a bit measurement tool SCT monitor. So are you ready? Let's take a look where they are today. Here you see one of set monitors, data dashboards, visualizing the action performance. So wich has a 10 years goal. The first conference was done last year when they reached 140,000, a little bit more than 100 and 40,000 women. And since we don't, don't know yet, the exact data of this year, 2021 we've done an evaluation that the conference will reach 100 and 80,000 women. So here you can see the actions SDG impact, which is SDG five to increase gender equality and women and girls empowerment. You can see also the ESC impact which is social impact. And in, in we are increasing the gender equality in a larger sense. The current value here is the is the co-operative value of the baseline. So last year's how many women were reached. And with the 2021 evaluation that we done and it goes almost up to 320,000 women, out of 1 million go the growth rates. Uh So if this year's women, that conference gets so inspired that 180,000 women and girls, they will be around 93,000 women ahead of their talk.

This growth rate always indicates whether you are on track ahead or leaving behind of the attack. So the actual performance here down present, visualizes the journey from start to the target and uh in set monitor, these dashboards can be shared with anyone and communicated in different channels in order to increase transparency and bringing sustainability performance alive with data.

So for executing the sustainability action plan, all actions need to be measured with quantitative data and a time frame in order to monitor the performance consistently and also who's responsible for its action. So only this where a company can actually be on top of their sustainability program or plan data is an ever more important enabler for communicating and disclosing these companies efforts on sustainability. And so shooting performance is creating a competitive edge against other companies, competitor companies.

And uh when sustainability, when it's sustainably managed, when the data is sustainably managed, it means a form to for clear and transparent sustainability communication that benefits all stakeholders, I will end with closing the loop. So as any big change starts with people and for being the force for good, we must see the light and learn our y actor first ourselves, right? So you know what's mine? Now, my question to you is what is yours? What drives you to act consistently every single day? What's the one action that you can take now that contributes to your company or organization sustainability journey? Thank you. So we have one minute So if anybody wants to ask anything, I will be looking at the chat. In the meantime, I would like to say that what we, what we usually say to our business clients is that choose your biggest est challenge first start taking action. Those small steps also count and wrap the rest around it because it's true that we cannot do everything at once. So rest focused and act daily towards your long term goals. Also, I want to add that we all have different y actors and I, I want to believe that the wife actor is something that is really driving you every single day. So I don't have kids. So probably my wife actor in the future would be my kids.

But it's hard to say because I don't have them. It can be also your work, it can be to your environment, it can be social in inequalities in the community that you are in discrimination. So if you don't know yet what's sustainability for you, start educating yourself and looking for information going from local to global take first what's going around you and where you are living in and uh and take it from there, join international communities. Discuss technology is really giving us a favor in that sense. And uh so business is, they consist about these people and these people sit in the boardrooms and these are also the decision makers. If the business is going to take the sustainability path or not. So if the business benefits of uh sustainability haven't reached the management level. It's hard to take action there and show any performance. So I really encourage you to start, start from yourself and uh and people around you and, and bring it to your environment and joburg.

Thank you very much for joining me and uh let's connect in linkedin. You can also follow us uh our sustainability journey SCT monitor through our linkedin or other social media channels.