 Welcome. So you've made it early in the morning to the first session, and I would argue maybe the most important session at this summit. And the reason is we're here to talk about the global goals. My name is Raj Kumar. I'm the president and editor-in-chief of DevX. We've been covering the sustainable development goals since they were first an idea when people were talking about the post-2015 agenda years before 2015. Here we are in 2017 now. And it almost is like a little test. I have gone around wearing this SDG pin. And I can say that I still get people coming up to me at events and saying, oh, that's a beautiful pin. What is that? But increasingly, including at this summit, I have people coming up saying, oh, the global goals, the SDGs. Awareness is much higher now than just even a year ago. At Davos this year, this symbol was everywhere, on the lapels of corporate CEOs, world leaders, as the backdrop to so many events. So the sustainable development goals have arrived. They should. It's 2017. We're here to talk about maybe the hard part. We thought the hard part was creating them. The hard part, turns out, is implementing them. So we have a fantastic panel working at the level of the region, of the country, of the company, to talk about how they're actually being implemented and what some of the barriers are. And we're going to get into a discussion right now about that. So let me tell you who we have. Alicia Barsena Ibarra, who leads ECLAC, which is the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. She's got a long career at the UN and in the region was the Chief of Kofi Annan's cabinet when he was Secretary General and has, in addition to expertise across many issues, particular expertise in environment, which we might get into in a minute. It's key to the SDGs. We have Simón Gabriela Muñoz, who is the Minister of Planning for Colombia and has been working on these issues at the level of Colombia quite a bit. You may have heard him speak already a few times here at the summit. We will be digging back into some of those issues with him today. And then we have Javier Pastorino, who is the Chief Executive for Siemens, which is the Chief Executive for Siemens here in Argentina, but he wears another hat, which is he leads Siemens energy business for the entire region. And so we're going to talk to him quite a bit about energy as well, which is another key pillar of the SDGs. So we will be operating in English and Spanish. So you have your headsets if you need them. I'm going to ask Alicia to get us started with a little bit of the background on what the SDGs are, why they matter, and especially the regional perspective, why they matter for Latin America and the Caribbean. Please, Alicia. Muchas gracias y muy buenos días. Good morning, and this is a pleasure for me, because this agenda 2030 with its 17 goals and 169 goals and so many indicators. We have called it a civilization agenda. Why? Because it talks to a change in paradigm, facing a problem that we know in civilization-wise, where we have to solve at least some of the most oppressing problems, such as global inequity or growth. Yes, but not at any cost. Or we're talking about shared prosperity and, of course, how we manage to get to environmental sustainability. This is an agenda that we have qualified as rights agenda, where the citizen adopts his or her own rights, and it's a difficult one because unlike the ODGs, this has been developed by the member states, and also because it's a universal agenda, not only for the environment or the developing country, but everybody for Finland, Norway, the US, et cetera. Everybody has to comply. And I call it a civilization agenda because it has very important proposals, such as eliminating extreme poverty in 2030. So there's a vision towards 2030. It's not an agenda for tomorrow, it's an agenda for the upcoming 13 or 14 years. And it's an agenda that sets forth very concrete goals, like eliminating extreme poverty. In Latin America, it means taking 75 million people out of poverty, and the countries have engaged, like the Society of Colombia, you provide electrical power to 23 million people who are those who do not have electrical power in our region, or moving from zero percent starvation or food security, not only not being hunger. We move away from basic diseases not being covered, but moving towards a healthy life, and a very important thing is how we accompany people throughout their life cycle, from cradle to tomb. So that is the attention from cradle to grave. And this is very important. One of the most important things is the gender equality, that is the equality of women throughout her life. It's not only a social issue, it's an economic issue as well. Women are most of the population, so it's not a minority issue. And I think that the gender equality is absolutely of the essence, starting from economic, political, and physical autonomy. I believe women may contribute and can contribute, and that's what the agenda talks about. But the agenda also talks about very concrete issues such as water. Water will become one of the main problems in the future. Look at what's going on in Africa today. There is already a migration, why? Because the Chad Lake has been reduced 70 times in the last 14 years in Sudan. They have other problems as well, true, but yet that's a big problem. In this agenda, we also find something which I believe is essential, which is jobs, employment, the importance of solving poverty and inequality, not providing people with money or grants, but with work, with decent work. And I think we also tackle issues such as cities, oceans, production, consumption, biodiversity, and so on and so forth. You take a look at this little booklet where we have the 17 goals, the agenda. You will say, hey, I would love to have a world like this. I would love to have this world by 2030. So this agenda has become a fundamental agenda. Simone will tell us because Colombia is the most advanced country on how to move towards the agenda. But what I want to say, what ECLAC suggests. ECLAC suggests to the region, first of all, to really bring this agenda on board the national development programs and the national budgets, because this has to be implemented because it's already beautiful, but where is the money? Follow the money. So we need means for implementation. Second, this has to be measured because whatever is not measured is not counted and what you don't count doesn't count. So you have to break the statistical silence. For example, in the case of gender equality, and that's why we in ECLAC have the statistics of the American Conference. We have brought together all of the institutes of the region, together with the geographic institutes, to make sure that we can measure, measure, measure. Give it to the people, not only with statistics and data and surveys, but also big data. And here we need the private sector. We've done some agreements with Twitter, WhatsApp, and Facebook to know what people think of some of these problems. Third, we are suggesting a form of the Latin American Caribbean countries that will take place between April 26th and 28th in Mexico, where the countries will come. These will be the countries that have to report on the progress made and will bring the private society to debate on these issues in Mexico from April 26th to 28th in Mexico. I'm glad you mentioned that these goals are universal. I still hear people saying the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, they're not the United Nations goals. They are every country's goals. They're every citizen's goals. Ultimately, that ownership that Alicia referred to is our ownership. And it's up to us to work with our governments and our companies to ensure these goals are met. And with that, I'd like to go to Simone to hear about the case of Columbia. As Alicia mentioned, you are quite advanced actually as the Minister of Planning in using the SDs. How are you using them? How are you implementing them? Well, thank you. Columbia was the first country to implement. So we had nobody to teach us, nobody to show us the best practices. We just did and learned together at the same time. I have a number of thoughts. First of all, the Sustainable Development Goals are just common sense goals. These are not strange things. They are not complex things. As Alicia was saying, these are things that everybody would love to have, drinking water for all citizens, improving the quality of education, fight against climate change. These are reasonable things. And these are probably things that the governments have already been doing, but they don't know. So that's the first step. The second step is the so many facets or faces that the Sustainable Development has. It's not only having a developed country and a recipe for development, although the Millennium Development Goals have the 18 goals and 169 sub-goals. And just for you to know, 110 need for the national government and territorial entity to work. That is, mayors and governors must work together if we want to comply with the goals. 88 of these goals have to do with private sector and civil society. If we don't work with them, they cannot be complied with. 34 have to do with international issues. That is, just like ECLAC, which is for Latin America, the countries have to get together to agree, discuss, know how to solve problems. In other words, it is not only that the developing countries and developed countries get together, but there must be with mayors, with governors, with civil society, private sector, and with the international community. And looking, revisiting this national example. We've interviewed you before on DevEx about six months ago, and you gave an example of food waste, just so we can make it really concrete for our audience. Tell us about the case of food waste. These are common sense. Some of the interesting things about public policy of the ODS is that always in Latin American context, we are used to think about lack of food, lack of education, lack of energy. It's that we never think about waste, which is a very important part of the agenda, but nobody ever measured it, as Alicia said. One of the goals is precisely to talk about the waste of food and the framework of implementation. What we found is that everything was fine, and we had something like 32 indicators that we were not measuring. So we started measuring them for the first time. And we had, for example, food waste. The number was 34 percent, 34 percent for a country that has malnutrition, 8 percent of its population in extreme poverty, and a Catholic country where the idea of wasting 34 percent of the food produced is impossible. Maybe if we didn't have so much waste, we wouldn't almost have to import any food. So we have had three projects that are Republican in the name. We work with finance organizations to have financial funds or funding for prevention of food waste. And you can see one single data can change the policy of a country. In other words, the goals have given us a number of views or paths. We have today actions, laws, budgets, and 86 percent of the goals. It is really a ministry priority. Every minister knows what he or she has to deal with in these goals. But we are still learning more. But the good thing is that we are here in a context of private sector, and I will end with my presentation with this many. Countries do not have long-term perspective tools. Nobody can tell you what the energy policy will be 10 years from now. However, something very good about the SDGs is that these are regulatory perspectives, especially for the private sector. In other words, if you take the goal number seven, energy, it tells you what you have to reach. And if I'm private sector, I know that for the upcoming 13 years, we will have to introduce renewables in the matrix. I know that energy efficiency will be of the essence, and so on and so forth. The private sector has views that sees the regulatory perspective where the regulation is going to and where the government is going to. Maybe this doesn't happen this year or next year, but it will happen. Eventually it will happen. So for the private sector, must cater for this because the goals are exactly this regulation perspective that is so important for investment. Next speaker, Javier, about the private sector. I'll just mention when the SDGs were being implemented, I got the opportunity to attend the UN General Assembly and to do a panel like this, and Bill Gates was one of the panelists, and a reporter asked him from the audience, said, you know, doesn't this all sound like happy talk? There's no way you're really going to implement these SDGs because the cost is in the trillions of dollars. There's no money to do this. And he had a one word answer, which was innovation. And when I think of where that innovation is going to come from, it's companies like Siemens, who are driving the innovation that is going to make these SDGs possible. So tell us Javier, a little bit about how the SDGs matter for your business. Is it something you do kind of philanthropically on the side? Is it part of the core business? What is it? Well, that is exactly the issue. First, it starts with the commitment of business leaders. But to me, the key of all this, which creates a sort of virtuous circle, is when working on the SDGs becomes an integrated, an integral part of the business processes. And this creates a virtuous circle, as I just said. Another effect that's very positive is that very often in HR, we talk about motivation of people. And one of the components, one of the key components of motivation is what we call purpose. So if the business strategy has a purpose that is completely aligned with the achievement of these SDGs, in addition to motivation and attracting people, they act as a motivating element, as a key motivating element. Let me give you an example of how we are addressing this ourselves. Because our strategy, we call it business to society. We say, we make real what matters. That is, all of our strategy is aimed at this concept of business to society. And in this regard, we've defined six pillars. I'll give you very concrete examples. And these pillars, in these pillars, we address all SDGs. First is advancing the economy. Siemens is a company that's present in 200 countries. And in direct and indirect terms, it has a growth impact, GDP of around 250 billion, just so you see our impact. And one of the issues we're working on here is access to energy and electricity by the people. Let me give you an example. Here in Argentina in the last 10 years, 80% of all the installed capacity was made by us. We made that. And the other point, again, the second pillar of our strategy, business to society, is developing, creating jobs, providing, delivering training and creating quality employment. In Berlin, we have what we call the Siemens Professional Education Center. And where we work on education, on mechatronics, robotics, digitalization and this is then people duly qualified for the jobs. And today we have the idea of replicating this method in other countries. And in Argentina, we are working on this. We referred to innovation earlier. That's the third pillar of our business to society strategy. Siemens invests five billion euros a year in research. We created what we call the next 47. That's a strategy to make investments in incubators or new innovative proposals to generate new business models. And one billion is being invested in the next five years. The fourth pillar is environmental stewardship and the environmental portfolio of Siemens, ranging from energy efficiency to renewable energies, generates more than 500 billion worth of reductions in CO2. And that's approximately 60% of Germany's emissions or more than 100% of the emissions generated here in Argentina. The fifth pillar is improving living standards, the quality of life. And this has to do with all SDGs. And there we have our healthcare portfolio, which is aimed at working on this direction. And lastly, supporting transformation in society. That's the last pillar. And there we have all the corporate social responsibility initiatives. Just to give you an example here in Argentina, we're working on the experiment project with all the schools of the city of Buenos Aires and several schools from the suburbs. We created a kit, which is an experiment box where teachers together with students work on projects to create, come up with ideas for energy efficiency. And all this, and just to conclude, this has to do with pursuing SDGs. SDGs have to be an integral part of the business strategy. That is what we call business to society. And when that's embedded in the strategy and in the business process, it becomes a virtuous circle and it does work naturally. Give you all a scale, the sense of the scale of innovation that we're talking about in a company like Siemens, as you're here today, spending the day at the web, just imagine just this one company will register 30 patents, just one company. So you think of all the innovative companies in the world and you think of issues like renewable energy or food waste or energy efficiency, this is absolutely critical to what underpins the SDGs. So we have very little time left, but I just would like a couple of sentences from each of you. For those who are watching this on the live stream or the reporting media that are here, how do they know how we're doing with this implementation? How can they keep track of this? What should be some kind of important indicators they look at to understand, particularly how this region is doing when it comes to implementing the SDGs? Anyone wanna start with that, Alicia? Yes. We have a webpage about SDGs and that is where we publish everything that countries are doing in terms of institutional arrangements, how they are incorporating SDGs to their national development plans, indicators, and we intend to make an annual assessment of progress. This year we will present one first assessment. I love what Siemens is presenting because we believe that in the Sustainable Development Forum from April the 6th to the 28th, where countries will meet civil society, participants from the private sector, they will all meet for the first time to make a regional assessment and measure yearly what we achieve. We want this to be an open platform so everybody can go in. We want it to be interactive so people can say, well, I'd like to know how Costa Rica's doing, how Argentina's doing? Well, Argentina says they're doing this, plus this, plus this. Let's publish all the indicators and the follow-up that each country's making. I would say that they started in 2015 and now countries are getting ready to comply. They are finding the institutional architecture for implementation, they're gathering data. I would say data is very important for this exercise. They are looking at baselines, not only measuring things, but how they break down things. In other words, if I want to have a gender vision, how do I look at data for women or for rural areas? So what we're mostly doing is preparing the baseline where we stand, deciding what we will do. In the case of Colombia, we have 86%, but to conclude, one of the important things is how we relate internationally. That's part of the equation. Many of these issues are not just things that depend on the government and on the government talking to their private sector, but this calls for a rethinking of international institutional architecture because what we have is not well adjusted to these goals. So I would say that we should think about how to incorporate technology is innovation. That could be very useful, but there is no good platform to do this at this point. So I would say that to comply, much of the reform required by the UN and the multilateral system has to be reflected. There are three ways to implement this. Money, financing, trade, which can help, business participation, investments, and I would say technological innovation. And that'll come not necessarily from government stakeholders, but from the private sector and civil society. We're more at DEV-X. I've had how we reform the international system. Javier? No, just to simply reinforce the concept of... Just to reinforce the notion that at least from the private sector, we need to have a strategy aimed at sustainable development goals. Goals, six initiatives, and actions. This has to be entirely embedded. It has to be embedded within the business process. Otherwise it doesn't work. Another important thing, and we've discussed this, is to have indicators, but not just indicators, but a very concrete action plan and a follow-up system, a follow-up scheme. The Germans have a good system there. But again, when this is part of the business process, the virtuous circle is created. Addressing SDGs, more business can be created. That is the virtuous circle. If we keep it separate, if we keep it at something marginal, it won't work. That's our reflection. That is something I've absolutely noticed. I was a skeptic when they were announcing these SDGs. As many people were in the global development community, the idea was, look, we need a whole book to understand these. They're so complicated that so many indicators and targets, but it turned out the complexity of these made them more useful because they actually reflect the complexity of the world and the issues we're dealing with. So when I speak to corporate executives, they say, we love this, because exactly to Simon's point, it gives us a guide. It tells us where things are headed so we can plan our business around it. And I think companies increasingly are adopting this. We certainly saw that in Davos this past session. And I think we have 13 years left. Might seem like a lot of time. It's actually not given the scale of these goals. So it's up to this excellent panel you've heard from today and to all of us here to ensure the implementation happens. So thank you for being part of this most important session of the day. And thank you to our fantastic panelists for being a part of this.