Sustainable businesses, technologies, and policies mean looking at the big picture. For example, while the growth of industry may alleviate poverty, that growth is not worthwhile if it destroys the environment and its community in the long run.

But what does this shift toward sustainability mean to women? Given that women, especially in developing economies, invest more in their families, their rise lifts the community. For the women themselves, greater agency typically includes access to birth control. This is especially important. Family planning, stable and healthy populations, are central to the notion of sustainability.  

So far, sustainability looks promising for women. Nonetheless, there are risks...

It is important to remember that women are more than a factor of efficient resource management. Women are individuals with rights. While sustainability is an excellent context in which to detail the benefits of more equitable societies, human rights require no justification. It just happens that when people are exposed to more opportunity and better practices, good things follow.

For manufacturers of birth control, a balance between sustainability and the rights of women is obvious. The selection of birth control should be personal. It is an expression of freedom — a right to health, comfort, and security. Every woman must make her own choices. Society must respect her choices. In so doing, we all benefit.

That’s why Naked Condoms, the first condom manufacture to cater exclusively to women, is excited to support the United Nations forthcoming Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The successor to the Millennium Development Goals, which expire this year, the SDG will extend the most successful global agreement ever. Since their announcement 15 years ago, governments, NGOs and businesses around the world have worked together to achieve major successes in the fight against poverty, hunger and disease.

An innovation in the SDG is an explicit commitment to gender equity, goal #5. It is important that gender equity be recognized as important feature of sustainable solutions. We must view that recognition as an invitation, even a requirement, that women exercise their private rights as they wish.