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Eradicating extreme poverty remains one of the most significant and challenging sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. The latest World Bank statistics from 2018 show that extreme poverty in MENA increased from 2.6% to 5% between 2013 and 2015. MENA ranks third among developing regions for extreme poverty and fell short of halving extreme poverty by 2015 – the target established by the United Nations’ (UN) millennium development goals, the precursor to the SDGs. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of financial inclusion on extreme poverty for a sample of 34 countries over the period 1990–2017.

Using system general method of moments dynamic panel estimation methodology on annual data for 11 MENA countries and 23 emerging markets (EMs) over the period 1990 – 2017, this study begins by estimating the impact of financial inclusion – using measures of access and usage – on the eradication of extreme poverty by 2030, the first goal of the SDGs.

The results of the study indicate that, on one hand, financial access measures have a positive, statistically significant impact on reducing extreme poverty for the full sample and the MENA region. The second part of the study uses a gap analysis against four poverty targets – 0%, 1.5%, 3% and 5% – and shows that no MENA country and few EM countries will be able to close the extreme poverty gap and reach the target of 0% by 2030 by depending solely on improvements in financial access. These targets are based on the two benchmarks set by the World Bank and the UN, with intermediaries to capture error and give a fuller picture of what is possible. However, if improvements in financial inclusion alone can bring every EM and MENA country except Djibouti and Romania to bring the most accessible target of reducing global extreme poverty to no more than 5% by 2030.

While research on poverty reduction in the region tends to focus on financial development and governance, less attention has been paid to the role of financial inclusion. SDG 1 – eliminating poverty in all its forms – explicitly highlights the importance of access to financial services. Indeed, evidence from Argentina, India, Kenya, Malawi, Niger and other countries demonstrates the ways in which financial inclusion can impact poverty (Klapper, El-Zoghbi and Hess, 2016). When people are included in the financial system, they are better able to improve their health, invest in education and business and make choices that benefit their entire families. Financial inclusion advances governments, too: introducing vast segments of the population into the financial system by digitizing social transfers, for example, can cut government costs and reduce leakage, with benefits that ripple across society. Yet, the links between financial inclusion and poverty reduction in MENA are less established. This study aims to analyze the importance of financial inclusion in addressing extreme poverty by 2030, the year UN member states set as a target for achieving the SDGs.

Since the 2015 introduction of the United Nations Global Goals, also referred to as the sustainable development goals (SDGs), we have witnessed a movement toward inclusion of goal-related initiatives listed under CSR strategy and in CSR sustainability reports. At the time of writing this chapter, the United Nations were presented a speech by young activist Greta Thunberg and many other activists commenced riots in major cities. All are pointing toward, what they perceive, as a lack of effort to solve issues related to climate warming. At the same time new research has revealed that targets for the SDGs are falling behind levels expected for 2030. There has also been concern for the potential of “SDG washing,” reported in the academic literature. This would greatly decrease the credibility of the goals over time. For this reason, it is vitally important to measure the impact of initiatives introduced to fit each SDG category and label. This will also assist with funding SDG implementation at a much faster rate. This chapter commences with a brief introduction of the SDG framework and discusses the United Nations and OECD methodology and the development and implementation of key global goals. Various research reports are discussed alongside a tracking study on uptake of the SDGs, and the need for SDG metrics to create transparency and evaluation. The chapter ends with example case studies of CSR strategy implementing and measuring the SDGs, alongside a discussion of financial vehicles released to support further development. The chapter also makes suggestions for future research opportunities to assist SDG progression.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges, interplay and potential directions for future service research to address the first three Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of no poverty, zero hunger and good health and well-being.

This commentary examines how service research has addressed these SDGs in the literature, and through the development of a theory of change, the authors propose an agenda for service research going beyond serving, to enabling and transforming service systems, expanding the current focus on individual to community and population well-being through promotion and prevention.

Service research has increasingly advocated human-centered approaches but requires a shift towards an all of humanity perspective. Individual and collective well-being have gained attention in service research, emphasizing the importance of considering collective well-being.

The commentary underscores the need for a comprehensive approach to develop services that contribute to the well-being of the human species. It calls for research that transcends dyadic interactions, considers systemic dynamics and broadens the focus from individual to collective and population well-being.

This paper discusses important societal issues of poverty, hunger and good health and well-being and the need for integrated and ecosystem approaches to develop equitable and sustainable solutions for collective well-being.

While SDGs 1, 2 and 3 address individual goals, they collectively underpin the well-being of communities and societies.

This study aims to examine the current state of academic research pertaining to the role played by artificial intelligence (AI) in the achievement of a critical sustainable development goal (SDG) – poverty alleviation and describe the field’s development by identifying themes, trends, roadblocks and promising areas for the future.

The authors analysed a corpus of 253 studies collected from the Scopus database to examine the current state of the academic literature using bibliometric methods.

This paper identifies and analyses key trends in the evolution of this domain. Further, the paper distils the extant literature to unpack the intermediary mechanisms through which AI and related technologies help tackle the critical global issue of poverty.

The corpus of literature used for the analysis is limited to English language studies from the Scopus database. The paper contributes to the extant research on AI for social good, and more broadly to the research on the value of emerging technologies such as AI.

Policymakers and government agencies will get an understanding of how technological interventions such as AI can help achieve critical SDGs such as poverty alleviation (SDG-1).

The primary focus of this paper is on the role of AI-related technological interventions to achieve a significant social objective – poverty alleviation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of a critical research domain such as AI and poverty alleviation.

The paper aims to advocate for innovative approaches in terms of the involvement of higher education institutions (HEIs) in the conservation of the environment, which fully considers and includes the developmental needs of indigenous communities while at the same time protecting the environment.

Using a qualitative study of indigenous communities and protected area (PA) authorities in Okhahlamba-Drakensberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, this paper explores the potential of the engagement of HEIs in capacitating indigenous communities to unleash their development potential towards reducing poverty and, thus accelerating the implementation of sustainable development goal one (SDG 1).

The paper shows that the enforcement of stringently protectionist policies in environmental conservation in PAs does very little to address issues of poverty because it leads to the marginalisation of indigenous communities and thereby their exclusion from using resources, which should benefit them. This undermines sustainable development, particularly the attainment of SDGs such as Goal 1, which targets ending poverty in all its forms everywhere.

Using the case of environmental management and governance of a PA in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, this paper highlights the fact that the attainment of SDG 1 can start at a micro-level and HEIs have a role to play in terms of collaborating with and understanding the needs of the rural communities so that research and innovation are geared towards meeting such needs. In this way, the paper advances the case of how the HEI-rural community-SDG 1 nexus can be established.

The authors estimate the reduction of electricity poverty in Vietnam. The essential argument is that human development is about subjective feeling as much as technology and income.

The authors use a self-reported satisfaction indicator as complementary to objective indicators based on national household surveys from 2008 to 2018.

In 2010, the fraction of households with access to electricity was over 96%. However, over 24% declared their electricity use did not meet their needs. Since 2014, the satisfaction rate is around 97%, even if 25% of the households used less than 50 kWh/month. Today there is electricity for all in Vietnam, but electricity bills weigh more and more in the budget of households.

The subjective energy poverty measure allows better international statistics: unlike poverty or needs-based criteria, self-assessed satisfaction of needs compares across income levels and climates.

Inequalities in electricity use among Vietnamese households decreased during the 2008–2018 period, but are not greater than inequalities in income, contrary to the findings of Son and Yoon (2020).

Engineering and econometric objectivist approaches dominate the literature on sustainability monitoring. Out of 232 sustainable development goal (SDG) indicators, only two are subjective. Yet the findings show that subjective indicators tell a different part of the story. Access is not grid building, but the meaningful provision of electricity to satisfy the needs.

This study examines the roles of poverty reduction and social inclusion as socioeconomic factors in achieving sustainable development (SD) in Nigeria from 1970 to 2019.

Vector error correction model (VECM) is adopted as the analytical technique. Three groups of factors are employed when determining SD: economic (per capital gross domestic product [GDP] and the inflow of foreign direct investment [FDI]), social (life expectancy, school enrollment, poverty and the proportion of women in parliament) and environmental (CO₂ emission and natural resource endowment).

The findings reveal that the economic factors (GDP per capita and the inflow of FDI to the GDP ratio) and two of the social determinants (life expectancy and school enrollment) have a positive effect on SD while the remaining two social determinants (poverty gap and the proportion of women in parliament) and the environmental determinants (CO₂ emission and natural resource endowment) have a negative influence on SD in Nigeria during the period under study.

First, this study integrates social inclusion into the poverty–SD nexus in the same study framework for a thorough analysis given that social inclusion has been identified as one of the leading variables affecting sustainability. Second, this study fills a gap in the literature by accounting for economic, social and environmental factors that influence SD, as opposed to the majority of existing studies that only employed environmental variables when examining the relationship between poverty and sustainability.

Implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) unarguably demands huge financial investments. However, the United Nations has acknowledged the huge financial gap militating against the implementation of the SDGs worldwide, leading experts to question the possibility of complete implementation of the goals by their terminal dateline of 2030. While the bulk of the finance currently outlaid on the SDGs comes from traditional sources including foreign direct investments (FDIs), there is the need to focus more attention on developing and exploiting impact investments that are more suitable for financing development programmes and projects. In this chapter, the SDG implementation profiles of the 12 Arab West Asia countries concerning the five most targeted SDGs were evaluated and sustainable finance issues were discussed. Secondary data were retrieved from World Bank's DataBank. The data were descriptively analyzed. Based on the profiles generated, debt relief is put forward as a possible impact investment mechanism suitable for funding the SDGs. Specifically, this chapter recommends that outright cancellation of debts based on the debt-for-SGD swap could serve as some of the impact investments needed to boost the global drive for a developed, peaceful, and just world.

The growing adoption of sustainable finance for inclusive agribusiness requires a cross-country comparison. In this paper, a comparative discourse of sustainable finance (SF) options for agribusiness transformation in Nigeria and Brunei is attempted; as well as examining the implications on entrepreneurship and enterprise development in both countries.

A mixed research method was adopted for this cross-country comparative analysis. To gain deeper insight into agribusiness and SF, the authors sourced the required data from scholarly articles, texts, World Bank data (2000–2016), national policy documents, working papers, national development plan reports, and other online resources on agribusiness and SF. The authors adopted mixed data (non-numeric and numeric data) because they allow for combining content analysis and secondary data in quantitative analysis (Williams and Shepherd, 2017). This mixed method approach follows a three-stage, namely: Data sourcing, Data development and conversion and Data analysis.

This discourse based on the mixed data produced four findings. Firstly, it was found that both countries have different statuses in the agribusiness sector, but Brunei had better growth performance in the crop, food, livestock, cereal production indices compared to Nigeria. Secondly, the challenges facing agribusiness in both countries include inadequate funding, misuse/mismanagement of land resources, deployment of extractive farming practices, application of ozone-depleting chemicals and pesticides among others have harmed the vegetation, the farmland, and the chemistry of the ocean resulting in low productivity. Thirdly, the SF options that are suitable for agribusiness transformation are green loans, green bonds, green credit, green investment funds, green mortgage scheme and other green financial support instruments given mostly as grants, subsidies and tax reliefs. The key guidelines for entrepreneurs seeking SF options for agribusiness are Principles 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 of the EPs.

The main limitation of the study is that the analysis and interpretation of the findings are based on descriptive statistics. However, future research should consider using rigorous econometric tests such as the Co-Integration Test, Test of Causality and Inferential Statistics that would enhance stronger generalisation and prediction.

The practical implication is that agribusiness transformation through sustainable finance options (SFOs) would bring about a structural change from the current subsistence agricultural practices to large-scale agriculture practices characterised by the deployment of agricultural information systems (AGRIS), precision agriculture and agricultural technologies. Flowing from the first implication, the nexus between agribusiness and SFOs will systematically improve agricultural productivity in the areas of crop production, fishing, livestock and forestry in both countries. Thirdly, an improved agribusiness would boost food production and availability thereby mitigating the rising trends in food insecurity, food inflation, food poverty, and ultimately will help actualize SDG 1(No poverty), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), and SDG 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing).

The authors contribute to the literature on SF and agribusiness in emerging economies by identifying an inclusive strategy that matters for agribusiness transformation in high-income and low-income economies.