Great news for Irish social enterprises.

Ireland's Department of Rural and Community Development launched its new National Social Enterprise Policy!

This looks great for social enterprises but how do you know what this policy mean for Ireland’s wider sustainable development goals?

We thought we’d go beyond the ‘output’ and find out what the ‘impact’ will be of this policy using Accelerating Action.*

The Trading for Impact: National Social Enterprise Policy 2024-2027 is a powerful contributor to several Sustainable Development Goals (#SDGs), making a substantial positive and direct impact across multiple targets:

Environmental impact:
🌪️ 13.1: Strengthen resilience to climate-related disasters
🧠 13.3: Build knowledge and capacity to meet climate change
📊 13.B: Promote mechanisms for planning and management

Social impact:
📚 4.7: Education for sustainable development and global citizenship
⚡ 7.2: Increase global percentage of renewable energy
🌐 16.8: Strengthen participation in global governance

Economic impact:
🏢 8.3: Promote policies to support job creation and growing enterprises
🌱 8.4: Improve resource efficiency in consumption and production
🌿 12.2: Sustainable management and use of natural resources
♻️ 12.5: Substantially reduce waste generation
🏢 12.6: Encourage companies to adopt sustainable practices and sustainability reporting
🌍 12.8: Promote universal understanding of sustainable lifestyles

Governance impact:
🔬 17.6: Knowledge sharing for science, technology, and innovation
🌍 17.9: Enhance SDG capacity
🤝 17.16: Enhance the global partnership for sustainable development
💡 17.17: Encourage effective partnerships
📊 17.18: Enhance availability of reliable data
📈 17.19: Further develop measurements of progress

But perhaps the most powerful impact it has is supporting and enabling social enterprises to achieve many more of the SDGs!

*You might recognise the resulting SDG Wheel graphic below from other Irish policies. Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications have already used Accelerating Action to map most of their key national plans, including the country’s Climate Action Plan) and we thought we’d get ahead of the curve and map this new policy first.