Current SME projects include:

Although individually small in size - up to 250 employees - SMEs cumulatively account for approximately 90% of businesses worldwide, and are responsible for 50-60% of employment.

As a result SMEs play an influential role in the sustainability agenda.

See an overview of the SME reports that have resulted from these projects and the GRI/GTZ Transparency in the supply chain project. 

Collaboration WRI New Ventures  

New Ventures is a World Resource Institute project that provides general support and help with accessing funding for SMEs worldwide. One of the main platforms for doing this is an annual forum where participating SMEs present their business plans to investors.

After seven years of operation, New Ventures is launching a sustainability reporting pilot project to better understand the social and environmental impacts of 11 selected companies from their global portfolio.

The GRI SME Team is providing support in terms of both the process and resources. Additionally we are exploring ways of helping the selected companies use sustainability reporting to gain new clients and investors, with particular attention to building their supply chains with interested multinational corporations.

More information on this project is available here.

Catalan Co-operatives partner to improve sustainability

"The basic principles of Co-ops are akin to many sustainability issues. Often Co-ops have already applied sustainability principles without realizing. The benefit of reporting is that it is a great way to communicate these efforts to the world.”

Eloi Montcada.

Lavola, Project consultant.

Forty Catalan Cooperative Enterprises (Co-ops) will partner with GRI and the Confederació de Cooperatives de Catalunya (CCC) to strengthen their sustainability reporting and improve their sustainability performance.

In initiating their sustainability reporting processes, the Co-ops will test the SME Handbook.

Throughout the project, the 40 Co-ops will receive three workshops on

• how to begin a reporting process;
• how to create a sustainability report based on the G3 Guidelines;and
• how the SME Handbook can support their reporting needs.

The project has a special focus on the particular needs of Co-ops when it comes to reporting, and also on how the regional lessons learned can be disseminated throughout Spain.

The project is part of a large RSE Co-op Initiative. Other partners include CEPES.

Contact GRI for more information.

Aggregated Reporting by SME Clusters

GRI worked with geographic clusters of SMEs from the same sector in emerging economies. This project explored the possibility of these clusters of SMEs starting sustainability reporting. Additionally the project sought to let the small and micro enterprises collaborate in writing reports. By combining their efforts and aggregating their data this allowed them to provide a certain level of transparency without prohibitively burdening individual organisations. The challenge was to find the practical balance between sufficiently specific information on cluster constituents and a manageable cost for providing it.

Transparency in Spanish pharmacies

Demonstrating considerable initiative, the Spanish Federation of Pharmacies (FEFE) representing a group of 22,000 Spanish pharmacies and the NGO FUINSA came to  GRI in mid-2006 wishing to begin measuring the social and environmental impacts of pharmacies and have them start up a reporting process based on the G3 Guidelines. 

In collaboration with FUINSA and FEFE from Spain, GRI is running a project with a sub-set of this group from different parts of Spain, who are piloting the implementation of the GRI Guidelines and the SME Handbook to produce their inaugural sustainability reports.

These Spanish pharmacies are all micro-companies with 5-10 employees.

Contact GRI for more information.