Corporate sustainability is no longer a niche conversation; it has become a defining agenda for businesses worldwide and must be tailored to align with different stakeholder values and regulatory environments. As the urgency to address social and environmental challenges intensifies, companies are increasingly tasked with aligning profit and purpose in meaningful ways. Achieving this alignment requires more than good intentions—it demands strategic rigor, bold innovation, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. In this interview, Dalberg Partner Layusa Isa-Odidi shares her expertise in navigating these complexities, offering insights into how businesses can deliver measurable impact while balancing competing priorities.

How have you seen the landscape around corporate sustainability shift over your ~15 years working with the private and public sector?

On the one hand, corporate sustainability has evolved from a niche concern to a core business priority for many companies worldwide. What was once the domain of a few pioneers—those looking to “do well while doing good”—has now become a mainstream consideration. Today, most boards and management teams have reflected on how environmental and social investments might align with better business performance, even if many stop short of acting on them.  The data underscores this shift—according to Climate Impact Partners’ sixth annual report on the state of climate commitments, 70% of the world’s largest 500 companies now have a public climate commitment. Other studies suggest that up to one-third of the largest publicly traded companies have made net zero commitments.

However, the approach to corporate sustainability varies across regions:

• The European Union has led the way embedding strong environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives into business frameworks.
• In contrast, the United States presents a more complex landscape. While many U.S. companies have intensified their reporting on ESG matters, political pushback has led some to scale back commitments, particularly in areas like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
• Elsewhere, government interventions like Australia’s Modern Slavery Act (2018) and the rise of regulated green taxonomies signal growing expectations for corporate accountability.
  Yet a major challenge remains, to separate the chatter and optics from deeply embedded and transformative efforts without insider knowledge. We are seeing some companies roll back their commitments recently, not because of a new regulatory environment, but due to a lack of the skills, guidance, and metrics required for designing and delivering on the relevant strategies.

But, overall, I am optimistic—Companies that are serious about making core business operations and supply chains more sustainable are finding each other. The growing body of data and best practices is helping firms demonstrate stronger business cases for sustainability. Governments, too, are playing a role—by setting standards, offering clearer guidance, and raising expectations of corporate accountability.

How do you see the Davos 2025 focus on reimagining growth and how will that influence the private sector in the coming year?

Companies are increasingly embedding sustainability into their core business models—through customer engagement, workforce development, supply chain resilience, and community investment. While these efforts vary across regions, the goal is to ultimately create more value for themselves in non-traditional ways, hence “reimagining growth.” This might mean leveraging technology to transform previously underserved populations into profitable customer segments—for example, by increasing financial inclusion using FinTech or growing new markets in response to sustainability challenges. When framed this way, corporate sustainability is aligned with how the most innovative companies have been growing their profits for decades. In particular, Davos highlighted opportunities related to the energy transition (e.g., opportunities in clean hydrogen, the boom in demand for critical raw minerals, and digital investments in bioeconomy), arguably the growth challenge that requires the most imagination today. I hope that these examples inspire more companies to turn their brightest minds to sustainability problem statements in a way that they are commercially viable and responsive to evolving economic and regulatory environments.

What are some strategies you’ve found particularly effective in making inclusive business models work? How do you approach tailoring them to different sectors?

The success of inclusive business models, whereby companies expand their supply chains to lower-income groups either as customers or suppliers, often hinges on developing as accurate as possible an understanding of the motivations and aspirations of those investments. Reducing the cost of serving or engaging is a technical problem and, with enough investment, companies will eventually get that right if technology allows. However, attracting buyers or sellers at the scale required to make the investment worthwhile is a very human problem. Too often, the architects of inclusive business models have a limited or incorrect understanding of how their target populations make decisions, designing without the deep human-centered research that is required to fully understand the unspoken needs of new client segments.

For example, when exploring how to increase farmer incomes in supply chains in collaboration with Mars Corporation’s Farmer Income Lab, our findings across a range of approaches piloted by large agricultural buyers was that they assumed that most farmers in their supply chain wanted to grow their operations; as a result, many programs provided similar offerings across the supply chain. However, many farmers saw subsistence farming as a stepping stone to entirely different industries and others were happy to only invest the minimum required in their farming activities while they focused on other endeavors. Without this understanding to inform a targeted approach, the companies were not maximizing the potential return on the investments they were making in upskilling and providing free inputs to entire farmer cohorts.

Examples on the demand side include understanding the events around and frequency with which different segments consume a product or the way in which demand for a broader bundle of related services might evolve over time. The latter is especially relevant for financial and insurance services, where there is an opportunity to deepen both the social impact and the value from a customer over time, say as somebody moves from a savings account to a loan.

What’s one key trend shaping the future of corporate sustainability, and how is Dalberg adapting?

One trend I’m closely watching is the integration of social and environmental goals under a unified corporate strategy. This shift helps businesses measure impact more holistically, though it does present challenges in balancing priorities. For instance, investing in desalination to combat water scarcity can harm fishing and coastal communities, which prompts moving toward alternatives like green infrastructure and demand-based strategies. However, in Khulna, Bangladesh, a green infrastructure project aimed at reducing salinity had the unintended consequence of raising salinity in the source river and disrupting livelihoods, pointing to challenges in balancing priorities. A successful example where such a balance was achieved is that of Novamont in Italy, which develops bioplastics and biochemicals from waste and low-input crops. Their biorefineries, built on decommissioned industrial sites near waste sources, support local communities by creating jobs and partnering with farmers.

While most corporates continue to pursue the environmental (E) and social (S) aspects in siloes, one of the more popular questions I have received from executives over the last year is how to integrate these agendas and in what cases. Most often, this came from sustainability executives on the E side now tasked with at least linking environmental and social reporting. However, I also encourage sustainability executives on the S side to think about this as it is a compelling way to link their work into core business investments in cases where the social potential is being overlooked. Dalberg supports clients in defining integrated measurement frameworks that help demonstrate the links between sustainability activities and allow companies to develop a whole-of-business view of the results of those efforts.

How do you approach building multi-stakeholder partnerships to address complex social and environmental challenges?

The foundation of successful partnerships lies in deeply understanding the objectives, constraints, and incentives of all parties. At Dalberg, we prioritize engaging both corporate and non-corporate stakeholders, allowing us to navigate differing decision-making processes and uncover shared value. Recognizing early that drivers of organizational behavior can vary significantly is crucial. Partnerships are not about forcing alignment but about creating the right conditions for mutual benefit and long-term impact. One experience that first exemplified this for me was Dalberg’s partnership with Mars, Incorporated and Wageningen University to develop a piece of research around what agricultural buyers could do to increase farmer incomes and their supply chains. Our ways of working were vastly different, but we leveraged these differences to refine our insights, avoiding the shortcomings of more extreme, siloed approaches.

A critical distinction lies in separating what corporations can and should pursue alone from what necessitates collective effort. Internally, businesses must focus on initiatives that drive performance and resilience over the medium to long term. Externally, partnerships offer a space for innovation, co-investment, and engagement in broader societal goals—such as brand building, future market development, and strengthening community ties.

Connect with Layusa to know more about her work: