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On Friday, July 10th, the WASME International Secretariat in Sector 16A, Film City, Noida, hosted Dr. Benno Böer, Programme Specialist – Natural Sciences at the UNESCO New Delhi Regional Office, as Chief Guest for the inauguration of a new SDG and Climate Science Literacy Exhibition. The ribbon-cutting and exhibition walk-through opened WASME's "Export Promotion & Global Markets, Made in India, Sold Globally" session, the third instalment in WASME's ten-part MSME Outreach & Capacity Building Series 2026, moderated throughout by Mr. Anwar Sadat, Chief – Business Strategy & Trade Development at WASME.The session followed closely on the heels of WASME's Global Business Convergence Summit 2026, held in New Delhi around the 7th World MSME Day, giving the Noida gathering added weight as a follow-through on commitments made at that larger platform. Bringing together UNESCO, the Ministry of MSME, the National Stock Exchange, NASSCOM, and a cross-section of trade strategists in one room, WASME positioned the day as a working model for how the SDGs and "Made in India" can function as complementary engines of export growth for NCR's MSMEs, rather than competing priorities.
The pairing of the SDG exhibition launch with a hands-on export-readiness agenda was deliberate. As Mr. Sadat framed it in opening remarks, sustainability alignment and export competitiveness are no longer separate conversations for India's MSMEs access to markets like the EU increasingly runs through sustainability reporting and ESG compliance, making UNESCO's climate literacy work directly relevant to the trade agenda WASME champions on the ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zbdv5XHyhM
The exhibition, presented as a poster series accompanied by supporting guidelines and a bilingual (English and Hindi) radio program, was developed by UNESCO to counter what Dr. Böer described as widespread confusion around climate change in a landscape crowded with climate deniers, "black painters," and greenwashers alike. As the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO's mandate is to ground the public conversation in unbiased scientific research, starting with a basic but often misunderstood distinction: weather is what we experience day to day, while climate is the pattern measured over 30-year periods. Understanding that distinction, Dr. Böer explained, is the first step toward building real climate resilience.
Dr. Böer traced how human-driven climate change has accelerated sharply over the last 150 years of industrialization, layered on top of 2,000 years of deforestation, and how the resulting pressures on water, energy, and agricultural security ripple into every one of the 17 SDGs. He pointed to New Delhi's own dependence on the Yamuna River as an example: shifting precipitation patterns in the Himalaya directly threaten water availability for the nearly 35 million people who call the city home.
He grounded the exhibition's urgency in current numbers: as of the most recent data he cited, roughly 821 million people worldwide go hungry every day one in ten globally more than a billion people have no or limited access to electricity, and over half of humanity faces at least one month a year with limited or no access to clean water. The SDGs, he noted, were designed by the United Nations in partnership with its member states to reflect humanity's shared challenges and hopes, chief among them peace, clean air, clean water, food, and dignified work, so that no one is left behind. He extended that principle directly to enterprise: human dignity, as enshrined in the UN Charter, means treating every person with dignity whether they work in a small enterprise, a medium enterprise, or a large one.
Dr. Böer also placed the SDGs in historical context, tracing their lineage back through the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015) to the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the Stockholm Declaration that first articulated many of the same aspirations in earlier form. On the question of whether the 2030 targets will be met, his assessment was direct: most certainly not, though progress varies significantly by country and by goal, a gap he framed as precisely why grassroots literacy efforts and MSME engagement matter now. Looking beyond 2030, he raised the case for a future SDG dedicated specifically to clean air noting that while people can survive roughly three weeks without food (SDG 2) and three days without water (SDG 6), the margin without breathable air is measured in minutes, a point he tied back to New Delhi's own air pollution challenge affecting all 35 million of its residents.
MSMEs as the backbone of climate resilience
Dr. Sanjiv Layek, Executive Secretary of WASME and NGO-UNESCO Liaison Committee Member (2024–26), welcomed Dr. Böer and noted that WASME has aligned its work with UN sustainable development goals since 1980, framing the exhibition as a natural extension of that decades-long mission. Ambassador Prof. (Dr.) Kheswar Chandan Jankee GOSK, President of WASME, followed with a Presidential Address underscoring the scale of what is at stake for India's MSME sector, which contributes 31% of GDP, 50% of exports, and 70–80% of employment nationally figures that also explain why SDG and sustainability alignment matters for MSMEs eyeing international markets, particularly in Europe, where sustainability reporting is increasingly a market-entry requirement.
Dr. Böer, in his Chief Guest address, echoed this point, noting that small and medium enterprises are the true backbone of economies worldwide outside India as much as within it employing and contributing more, in aggregate, than a handful of large multinationals. He walked through how MSMEs touch nearly every SDG in practice: creating jobs that directly reduce poverty (SDG 1); powering agriculture, food sales, transport, and water purification that support zero hunger (SDG 2); and contributing to health and wellness services, including insurance access, under SDG 3.
Dr. R.K. Bharti, Director, MSME-DFO, Ministry of MSME, Government of India, delivered the Guest of Honour & Keynote Address, adding the government's perspective on where policy support for MSME sustainability and export readiness is headed.
From exhibition to execution: a full afternoon of export-readiness
Opening remarks from Mr. Naveen Sharma, Senior Advisor to WASME and Chairman of Athena Ventures, set the stage for why MSME exports matter under the day's "Various Routes, One Session" theme on global e-commerce. What followed was a tightly run sequence of Impact Sessions, each built around a concrete takeaway rather than general topic coverage opening, fittingly, with a session that made the SDG connection explicit before the programme moved into trade mechanics:
Ms. Indrani Pushilal Singh, Empretech India Foundation, opened the technical programme by directly linking MSME export challenges to the Sustainable Development Goals — setting the frame that sustainability and export readiness are two sides of the same effort
Dr. Inder Negi, Governance and International Trade Strategist, on preferential market access leaving participants with an actionable checklist of tariff benefits and eligible categories under the India-UAE CEPA and India-UK FTA
Mr. Avinash Kumar, President & Co-Founder, ESG & Decarbonization, Earthhood Services Limited, on claiming new tariff benefits while equipping exporters to meet the environmental and governance standards increasingly demanded by global buyers and green/renewable-linked trade finance
Mr. Sudhanshu Mittal, Head & Director – Technical Solutions, NASSCOM, Enabling MSMEs to accelerate digital transformation through Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, AI, IoT, automation, and advanced technology adoption for enhanced productivity and global competitiveness.
Mr. Aditya Verma, Ideas to Impact Foundation, on cross-border e-commerce and seller onboarding for first-time exporters
Ms. Nidhi Maheshwari, National Stock Exchange (NSE), on SME IPO readiness and the capital-markets pathway for export-oriented MSMEs scaling toward public listing
Mr. Javed Alam, CEO, Calidad Ventures, on scaling Indian-origin enterprises into GCC and global markets
Mr. Sadat then moderated an extended open Q&A and panel discussion with all speakers, giving the 30 participating MSMEs direct access to each expert, before delivering the closing remarks and vote of thanks and tying the day's export-readiness content back to the sustainability framing Dr. Böer had opened the session with.
Advocacy, policy alignment, and the road ahead
For WASME, the July 10th session reflects a broader pattern of institutional advocacy that Mr. Sadat has driven in his role coordinating the organisation's engagement with UNESCO and other UN bodies treating each monthly roundtable as an opportunity to keep MSME policy conversations connected to global sustainability and trade frameworks, rather than as separate tracks. Ambassador Prof. (Dr.) Kheswar Chandan Jankee GOSK, WASME's President, situated the July session within the organisation's 45-year history and its network of more than 200,000 businesses across 100-plus countries that gives a single Noida roundtable genuine reach into global policy conversations.
A permanent exhibition, not a one-day event
Unlike a conventional inauguration, the SDG and Climate Science Literacy Exhibition is intended to remain on permanent display at the WASME International Secretariat, becoming a fixture that every subsequent session in the MSME Outreach & Capacity Building Series will pass through. That design choice is what turns a single ribbon-cutting into an ongoing literacy programme: the July session was the third of ten in the series, and each of the seven roundtables still to come Women Entrepreneurship in August, GST & Regulatory Compliance in September, Green Business & Sustainability in October, Workforce & Skilling in November, Innovation & IP in December, Supply Chain Resilience in January 2027, and Business Succession & Scale-Up in February 2027 will open against the backdrop of the same posters, guidelines, and bilingual radio programming Dr. Böer inaugurated in July.
The effect WASME and UNESCO are aiming for is cumulative rather than one-off: an MSME owner attending the credit-access session in May may not think of climate science, but by the time the same audience returns for October's Green MSMEs session on energy audits and carbon credits, the SDG exhibition will already be familiar territory rather than a new introduction. Dr. Böer's own framing that climate literacy has to be built the same patient way scientific literacy is built anywhere, through repeated, low-friction exposure rather than a single seminar maps directly onto WASME's monthly cadence. Each session becomes a fresh audience of 30 Delhi NCR MSMEs walking past the same climate-science material, in effect compounding the exhibition's reach across the roughly 270 business owners the ten-part series is expected to touch over its first year.
WASME plans to make the exhibition materials posters, guidelines, and the accompanying bilingual radio program available to its broader MSME network, and to continue building out the ten-month roundtable calendar as the primary vehicle through which UNESCO's climate science literacy work reaches Delhi NCR's small business community.
Contact: Anwar Sadat Chief – Business Strategy & Trade Development, WASME +91 9650247565 | cst@wasmeinfo.org wasmeinfo.org
World Association for Small and Medium Enterprises (WASME) WASME House, Plot No. 4, Sector 16A, Noida – 201301 Recognised by the United Nations with Consultative and Observer Status