United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are a call for action by all countries – poor, rich and middle-income – to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. 

They recognise that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and address a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and promoting environmental protection. 

In today’s world, the goals provide a critical framework for COVID-19 recovery.

The work of Blaze Your Trail directly addresses FIVE of these goals.

Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Many women are excluded from advancing their careers in technology, despite having qualifications in software engineering, because their career break to raise a family has put them behind. 

Now, many are retraining in Salesforce, enabling them to easily obtain the certifications they need to get a job thanks to transferable skills and the ability to understand multiple computing programming languages.

However, even when they have a range of skills, training, qualifications, work experience and certifications, they are still excluded from the workforce as they have no recent local and relevant work experience.

Migrant women frequently live on the periphery of our cities and are often the primary carers for their children. They need well-paid, flexible, meaningful work that fits around family life. They cannot manage a two-hour commute at the beginning and end of each day.

Blaze Your Trail will provide free training and work experience opportunities to girls and women to help them achieve gender equality.

Goal 8: Promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, employment and decent work for all

In April 2020, the United Nations released a framework for the immediate socio-economic response to COVID-19 as a roadmap to support countries’ pathways to social and economic recovery. One stream in that framework is promoting social cohesion and investing in community-led resilience and response systems.

The framework is underpinned by the understanding that strong environmental sustainability and gender equality are imperative to ‘build back better’. After all, women are not only the hardest hit by this pandemic, they are also the backbone of community recovery.

Blaze Your Trail seeks to provide training and local work experience for job seekers who struggle to break into their first Salesforce job - leading to decent work for all. 

Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation

As the pandemic reshapes the way in which we work, keep in touch, go to school and shop for essentials, it has never been more important to bridge the digital divide. 

Once the acute phase of the COVID-19 crisis is over, governments will need investments in infrastructure more than ever to accelerate economic recovery, create jobs, reduce poverty, and stimulate productive investment. 

Blaze Your Trail will create jobs, foster innovation and help charities bridge the digital divide.

Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries

Reducing inequalities and ensuring no one is left behind are integral to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. 

COVID-19 has deepened existing inequalities, hitting the poorest and most vulnerable communities the hardest.

The pandemic also puts at risk the limited progress that has been made on gender equality and women’s rights over the past decades. Across every sphere, the impacts of COVID-19 are exacerbated for women and girls simply by virtue of their sex.

Women continue to be underrepresented in technology industries, one of the four areas of ‘STEM’ (science, technology, engineering and maths). Experts believe it is unlikely the gap will be bridged for another 100 years (McKinsey & Company) because the biases are deeply ingrained and frequently reinforced.

Blaze Your Trail helps retrain and support women in technology roles and joins a global group of similar social enterprises such as pepUp Tech (USA), Refugee Force (Netherlands), Ladies Be Architects, Stemettes and Salesforce Supermums (UK).

Goal 17: Revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development

The Sustainable Development Goals can only be realised with strong global partnerships and cooperation.

A successful development agenda requires inclusive partnerships — at the global, regional, national and local levels — built upon principles and values, and upon a shared vision and shared goals that place people and the planet at their centre.

In this new digitally-connected world, work can happen anywhere, at any time. Blaze Your Trail will partner with like-minded organisations at the local and regional level to achieve the end-goal of equal participation in the benefits of technology - both for people and organisations.
It is possible for the tiny charity to use the same enterprise grade software as the biggest corporation. This is the democratic nature of technology. It does not see gender or size - it sees skill.