Sustainable Development and Us
Dynawealth's inclusive insurance and strategically interwoven microcredit and livelihood campaigns directly and indirectly support the attainment of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations and the various targets under each goal. We were able to validate the effectiveness of our strategies and methodologies and apply them by focusing on the unserved, underserved, ignored, and most vulnerable segments of the population due to our unwavering commitment and passion for increasing our contribution and impact in eradicating poverty and social inequity as well as restoring ecological balance.
Zealous and unremitting collaboration amongst all sectors, public and private, is indeed crucial as emphasized globally and enjoined persistently by governments to realize Filipino people’s aspirations embodied in the AmBisyon Natin 2040 and the SDGs. AmBisyon Natin (Our Ambition) is the Philippines' version of its strategic agenda for attaining comprehensive sustainable development representing the collective, inclusive, and equitable desire of the Filipinos aimed to be accomplished by 2040. Like the SDGs, it is the result of a long-term visioning process that began in 2015 but with a timeline that covers one generation.
Insurance is imperative to human progress. Its great contributions and impact on advanced, highly developed nations and economies, as well as in backing various industries and activities, including, in recent years, the restoration of balance in the environment, repeatedly prove its prowess and magic. For over two decades, inclusive insurance, particularly microinsurance, has underscored its immense power and great potential to help ensure the attainment of truly inclusive, equitable, and green development.
The relatively low insurance penetration, density, and premium volume in the Philippines and other Asian nations and most emerging economies reveal that more conscious focus is needed to make them influence economic prosperity positively. This is especially important for developing economies and nations afflicted by numerous risks, such as the Philippines, which loses more than 1% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on average each year due to calamitous events.
The perennial natural calamities confronting Filipinos and other peoples are being exacerbated by the twin crises – human health and economic – brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. These events affect the poor even more.
In a world filled with perennial hazards, distractions, and other uncertainties, insurance is essential and must be optimized. When such devastations occur, low-income populations, who are typically the most severely affected, return to zero and are generally pushed into negative and more difficult territories. Most unforeseen events can be insured. That is why, beyond its huge impact on the economy, inclusive insurance has the enormous capability to effect desirable progress and development now and in the future – for all generations.
Being aware and cautious has been proven to be insufficient and must be augmented. By preparing and becoming resilient, we mitigate, manage, and even prevent these risks and continue with our progressive evolution.
Poverty and social inequity are inextricably linked with the climate crisis and other environmental issues. By helping communities become resilient to natural calamities, we are helping the insurance industry attain better profitability as well. This could further enable re/insurance companies to support socioeconomic development in the process.
It could be very true that we will run out of healthy air, water, and food before we run out of energy. We believe more and more people should get involved in confronting environmental issues. Planet-saving activities can be easily supported by alleviating all or most of people's concerns by improving various aspects of their lives, especially their economics.
It is actually a good surprise that has dawned upon us that by making inclusive insurance more accessible, available, affordable, and extremely responsive, along with strategically providing microcredit and revolutionizing income opportunities, the 17 SDGs and several targets under them can be impacted directlyand indirectly by Dynawealth programs, especially when we eventually make more types of appropriate insurance become available on our platform.
How Dynawealth’s programs integrate, contribute to, and impact the 17 SDGs?
Goal 1. End Poverty in all its forms everywhere.
The Dynawealth movement inherently aids in the implementation of nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, particularly by guaranteeing substantial coverage for the unserved and the marginalized. We endeavour to help ensure that all men and women, in particular the poor and the vulnerable, have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to basic services, appropriate new technology and financial services.
By the end of 2020, 16.6% of the population of the Philippines, or about 17.6 million people, live below the poverty line. Those who reside in rural areas have a much higher chance of experiencing poverty, with nearly one-third of those under the poverty line working as farmers. This is relatively a smaller percentage compared to the 38.5% or 3 billion of the world’s poor who live on less than $2.50/day, but still at an alarming level.
The low-income sectors are more susceptible to debilitating shocks, particularly the ones brought about by the COVID-19 health and economic crisis and, in the case of Filipinos, the several natural catastrophes that confront us perennially, so insurance that is appropriate for them really matters for their recovery and sustenance and becoming sustainably resilient. Employment and consumption directly and indirectly resulting from insurance transactions also help them significantly in weathering the impacts of other economic, social, and environmental shocks and disasters.
Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.
Helping farmers, particularly those in the rural areas, avail themselves of insurance, especially for their crops, is a great step to help attain food security. They could easily grow crops by immediately having the resources to fund their work whenever disasters hit.
Lending and providing jobs prudently, by ensuring that the borrowers and those employed through this program are strategically prevented from being trapped by unchecked behaviors caused by damaging practices, could also help ensure having food on the table, among other benefits.
By simply doing all these and by adding value to related sectors and components of the economy, not only will productivity and incomes of the affected sectors improve, but so will the overall economy. They could also help ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, which help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters and that progressively improve land and soil quality.
Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
Our inclusion campaigns help guarantee equal access to financial risk protection, quality essential healthcare services, and safe, effective, quality-affordable essential medicines.
Empowering and improving the lives of people is an important element in strengthening the nation to prepare for, reduce, and manage the impacts of national and global health risks.
With sufficient income and peace of mind amongst the public, households could be assured of healthy lives and well-being, consequently reducing the number of deaths from hazards that we could strategically help them to avoid. By adding value to people and helping improve consumption, society itself enables the government to improve its social services. Improved lives could also mean more actors conserving natural resources, protecting the environment, and saving the planet, which subsequently ensures sustained sound health and well-being for all.
Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Leveraging appropriate technologies and integrating practical programs, Dynawealth helps impart upon young people and adults relevant life skills especially on finance and entrepreneurship while providing decent jobs and advancement opportunities.
Our system is also designed to gradually and timely provide tools for lifelong learning and advancement while all our programs are thoughtfully geared to promote them, which we believe the best tools for our organization’s progress and relentless success. By ensuring that these initiatives continue, our contribution to sustainable development could be significant as well.
Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
We encourage all genders to join us in serving all genders. There is no discrimination in our organization or in any of our campaigns. We are even positioning the company to be attractive to female team members. Our years of experience have taught us that softness among women is necessary for us to be effective in serving the more emotional masses. We continually validate and impressed by the effectiveness of women executives not only in our organization but also with other organized entities.
Because we understand the remarkable contributions of mothers in securing everything in households, we also specifically target them in our programs. Most of our borrowers and distribution partners are also women.
Goal 6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Our ultimate goal and courses of actions are geared towards freeing up families from concerns about the impacts of poverty and social disparity on their daily lives and future so as to enable them to help themselves and others, as well as contribute to protecting and restoring life-supporting ecosystems, reservoirs, and conveyances like watershed areas, mountains, upland forests, estuaries, mangrove forests, wetlands, and lakes, rivers and other tributaries.
By collaborating with local government units and people’s organizations, we not only provide better access to financial services, risk reduction and management mechanisms, and a form of livelihood, but also synergize with them on some ecological activities, including water and sanitation management.
Goal 7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
Strengthening the insurance industry so that it can support research and investments in energy infrastructure and clean energy technology, as well as improving people's living conditions, could help ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.
Upholding and supporting reforestation and sustainable land management can significantly improve their sustainability by reducing reforestation pressure on ecologically priceless primary forests. And it can also help to heal the land degradation impacts of mining for coal, gas, and petroleum-based fuels.
Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
Focusing on simple programs allows us to offer and continually develop decent jobs and advancement opportunities for the marginalized and excluded sectors without straining them to learn complicated things immediately.
Leveraging intuitive digitalization, we continually provide fitting technological tools and conduct capacity-building activities that gradually enable even senior citizens, people with disabilities, out-of-school youth, senior students, other informal workers and even village or local government volunteers to be excellent contributors to the economy.
We continually encourage and support productivity, creativity, and innovation, job creation, and the growth of micro-enterprises and other rural livelihoods by making financial services more simple, accessible, and effective. We also actively encourage formalization for more sustained progress amongst these sectors, which are at the backbone of the economy.
Agriculture insurance is also seen as an "antidote" to a variety of economic maladies, particularly when claims are processed quickly. It improves farmers' and agriculture-related value chains' financial resilience to shocks while also safeguarding the government's budget from volatility by moving part of the risk to private markets.
Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.
Innovative models of providing better access to financial services, including affordable credit, and their integration into value chains and markets, are indeed ideal for emerging economies like the Philippines, where higher shares of global GDP growth are being encouraged.
Not only does insurance provide financial security and peace of mind to households and businesses, but it is also a vital source of long-term capital, providing stability to financial markets and the overall economy, allowing governments to continually fund social services and infrastructures, and even perform vital ecological initiatives. By strengthening and positioning the insurance industry better by encouraging more responsible consumption, it could easily back inclusive and sustainable industrialization.
Due to the recent twin crises – economic and human health – caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, innovation and more aggressive building of digital infrastructures has reached a tipping point, and is also benefiting highly regulated industries such as insurance and finance.
Goal 10. Reduce income inequality within and among countries.
In recent decades, we have witnessed that inclusive finance is championing the closure of income gaps and social inequity in many parts of the world. Since the war is great, more armies should join, and we are glad to be given this opportunity.
By providing inclusive financial solutions and customizing income and advancement opportunities that matter to the masses, we ensure that our strategic positioning is constantly directed at effectively empowering and promoting the social, economic, and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, race, ethnicity, capability, origin, religion, or economic or other status. And by bridging the insurance and finance gaps amongst the emerging economies, we are addressing inequities amongst countries and working towards a more inclusive and sustainable world.
Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.
More insurance consumption means more consumption of other goods, which means more taxes and more muscles for the government and relevant private institutions to build liveable and sustainable cities and communities that are affordable, safe, secure, resilient, and augmented with the basic needs of their inhabitants.
Re/insurers could also generate more capital to invest in capital markets, use in public-private partnerships (PPPs), or invest in projects that will increase their bottom line, not only from business returns but also from reduced losses due to the intelligent infrastructures that they may be able to build.
Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Poverty mainly causes malnutrition and illiteracy amongst the most vulnerable. Though in small portions compared to those extracted and consumed in the developed economies, the poor have instinctively consumed some natural resources irresponsibly to survive. This instinctive urge primarily causes the wrong conditioning amongst these communities, which can be changed and prevented.
Improving people’s conditions and lifestyles in rural communities will be very strategic and great. Intelligent tourism development models are also prevalent because of their proven effectiveness and efficiency. These can be optimized to support people while also protecting the environment. Through technology and a fitting reward system, they, too, could be the best partners in conserving and securing our natural resources.
Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
As climate risks worsen, we are coming to understand more and more that we are indeed threatening each other’s well-being and endangering future generations. Doing the opposite is indeed the best and swiftest solution – we must educate, capacitate, and empower each other, everyone.
Crop/agriculture and property insurance, in addition to personal lines, as risk transfer mechanisms, could help in its reduction and management while allowing the government and other relevant organizations to work on making all communities aware, prepared, and resilient.
By promoting tree parenting and making reforestation more rewarding, we could improve and restore biodiversity and grow more verdant and resilient canopies and ecosystems to help cool the planet and improve our well-being. A mature tree alone can absorb an average of 22 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. This is remarkably powerful, especially when the locals are involved because they are aware of the endemic species suitable for their area.
Through the involvement of more and more people and aligned and supportive entities, especially in rural communities, more effective mechanisms, strategies, and policies for raising capacity for effective climate change-related planning and management could be crafted and implemented.
Goal 14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.
Our transactions are all digital. This allows us to be more efficient and effectual, but more importantly, it helps us conserve and protect our natural resources and restore the environment—the forests, the land, and the bodies of water in particular—and all the life forms that they support.
What we do on the land may affect biodiversity in the connecting bodies underground and in those it is connected to—the rivers and their tributaries, the seas, and oceans. Therefore, our activities should be constructive and not detrimental to the aquatic and marine ecosystems that they support by educating and mobilizing the communities to protect and improve their own land and avoiding activities that could lead to nutrient pollution and environmental degradation.
Part of our programs is to promote the restoration and expansion of our mangrove forests so as to help coastal communities become resilient. This strategy is not only ecological in nature but also very practical because it helps reduce damage in those areas whenever natural catastrophes hit, resulting in better profitability for the insurance industry and uninterrupted progress in said communities.
Goal 15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
We believe in and support restoration measures for reclaiming our lush highland forests and watersheds that are aimed at restoring terrestrial ecosystems and preventing biodiversity losses in those areas and are important for managing the water regime of the entire landscape, disruption of which might lead to inconsistencies in the volume and distribution of communal water. Reforestation and conservation are indeed crucial to creating a better, more sustainable future in which poverty is alleviated, food and water are plentiful, biodiversity is protected, and sustainable livelihoods are attainable.
Integrating promotion of ecological awareness and incentivizing involvement of interested parties in environmentally-inclined initiatives into our campaigns will primarily influence massive reforestation, among other activities. This will be considered mainly in identifying and developing agrotourism sites to be manned by the locals.
Making crop insurance more helpful may also lead to more responsible agriculture while providing additional or alternative livelihoods through insurance distribution and through microfinance-supported activities in the rural areas. With these, too much dependency upon terrestrial resources will be likewise minimized and prevented, and with healthy lands, there will be very productive and joyous people.
Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
By giving hope to people, especially the young ones, we could help them avoid embracing violent ideologies. So, helping their families prepare for the uncertain and avoiding getting trapped in usurious loans and other ineffective remedies and providing them with income opportunities that emancipate them from the chains of poverty plays a great role in our quest for social equity, peace, and justice.
The best way to fight corruption is by making it unattractive or unnecessary. By improving many people’s mental, emotional, physical, and even economic states, which also means having a strong and prosperous nation, there will be fewer opportunities for people to take advantage of others and the public funds.
Similarly, the same massive empowerment could hasten the development of effective, accountable, and transparent institutions at all levels, as a result of a more involved, participative, and well-represented public.
More institutionalized financial inclusion could also provide the better results necessary for crafting non-discriminatory laws and policies for equitable, sustainable development faster, which also means better promotion and enforcement of the same.
Goal 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.
Networks always win, and they continually do.
It is inherent for insurance transactions to be consummated and regulated by a potent synergy of intermediaries, insurers, government agencies, and the assured and/or his family. This is good and could be geared for optimum effects, particularly now that we are positioning it for more meaningful and wide-ranging impact. If teamwork makes the dream work, then better teamwork and an excellent network may enable us to complete the great work we envision for us all and future generations.
Since we commenced focusing more on reaching out to and including the unserved and ignored sectors, we have embraced networking and synergizing with financial service providers, related government entities, innovators and technology enablers, the communities, and the marginalized themselves. We also endeavor to attract more local and international support groups to expand and accelerate our validated outcomes.
Overcoming poverty, injustice, and environmental distress is a matter of justice, not charity. Every person has the basic right to live in peace and dignity and in a decent and safe environment.
In most cases, social injustice and environmental degradation are affordable and straightforward to correct, but they are enormously costly and dangerous to ignore. Anyone could act locally and have a global impact if we all possessed empathy and imagination.
It is now more important than ever to promote universal insurance and effective microfinance. The human race can actually win the race if we get busy doing our bit and never care about who gets credit or who earns a profit.
