The pilot project Business Contribution to the SDGs — A Student Assessment is a partnership of the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative, the Wikirate Project e.V. (Wikirate), the UN Global Compact, and the Bertelsmann Stiftung. The aims of the pilot stage of the project were to:

1. Embed the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the minds of the next generation of business leaders through active research and analysis, promoting engagement and familiarity with companies’ reporting outputs
2. Seek structured ways of tracking company performance towards the SDGs and the UN Global Compact’s Ten Principles, testing a broad selection of metrics of performance from standards like the Global Reporting Initiative and UN Global Compact’s Poverty Footprint.

The pilot included 9 higher education institutions, with 13 professors in 7 countries across 5 continents, engaging 950 students and generating over 20,000 data points on corporate sustainability performance. Student participants with different levels of education, from first year undergraduates through master’s students, generated data through researching corporate sustainability and annual reports of Global Compact participants submitted as Communication on Progress reports (COPs), and added it to the Wikirate platform.