The UN Global Compact is a North Star for companies around the world
The UN Global compact is a secretary general’s initiative to engage with the private sector. We were founded by Kofi Annan, the previous Secretary General of the UN. He went to the World economic forum in 1999 and made a very famous speech where he proposed a global compact to bring the UN and the private sector together in order to put a human face on the global market. That was at a time when globalisation was really taking hold. There was a feeling that the private sector was acting in a very self-interested way, so the UN and the secretary general wanted to engage with the CEOs of the world to encourage them to think about important principles, about human rights, labour rights, protecting the environment and fighting corruption on the basis that these are the things that business leaders really should think carefully about. So Kofi Annan proposed this Global Compact and here we are – 21 years later with almost 40 thousand companies that joined and signed up for these principles.