Priscilla Morley is as focused and goal-directed as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals that she manages as part of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) based at the Albert Luthuli Leadership Institute.

Priscilla Morley has always been driven to help others. “I thought I would be saving the world,” she says. It’s what drove her to study social work and attracted her to lead community development programmes for a major corporate and an expat celebrity’s foundation.

Her latest position, based at the University of Pretoria (UP), expands this focus and lifts it to new heights.

Morley has been appointed as network manager of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) South Africa. An initiative of the United Nations (UN), it is hosted by the Albert Luthuli Leadership Institute (ALLI) in UP’s Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. It is one of 42 such national networks worldwide. Its mission is to mobilise academic and research institutes to promote the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty and protect the planet and ensure prosperity, by 2030.

Morley reports to the Rwandan regional network. Closer to home, she reports to Professor Themba Mosia, Interim Vice-Chancellor and Principal at UP, who chairs the South African network. Morley started the job in January. The university year has barely begun, yet already she is full of praise for Prof Mosia’s hands-on approach. “He has been wonderful, extremely responsive and supportive of the SDSN, throwing in ideas, and committed to us engaging with students,” she says.

Ultimately, network decisions are taken globally. This includes vetting who can be a member. Those who wish to join can apply three times a year and various network managers across the globe vote on their eligibility.

The South African network was launched in 2022. It has nine members. These include UP’s business school, the Gordon Institute of Business Science, four other higher education institutions – the University of Cape Town, Nelson Mandela University, the Central University of Technology and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology – and two research organisations.

Morley says partnerships are central to the work of the network, “to profile what we’re collectively doing around SDGs”. Education awareness is also key, and the network has free resources such as short videos for anyone who wants to learn about the SDGs. The network also aims to make an impact on government policy.

And her role in all this? “You can see me as the link, as forming linkages between the SDSN member institutions we’re partnering with. If there’s an opportunity for member institutions to collaborate, we will link them. And then profiling South Africa and what we’re doing in terms of SDG efforts, and looking for opportunities to get new members on board.”

The network’s priorities are closely aligned with that of UP’s, which is ranked as one of the leading universities in the world for it efforts towards achieving the SDGs. In the 2023 Times Higher Education Impact Rankings, UP was placed in position 69 out of 1 705 universities in 115 countries. It was in the top 20 universities in the world for two SDGs: fourth for SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and 14^th for SDG 5 (Gender Equality). It was also ranked in the top 100 for five other SDGs.

With that level of synergy, the University agreed to fund the network though the Vice-Chancellor’s Office. Now Morley is hard at work to find additional funding to expand their activities. They plan to raise the network’s profile by increasing its presence on social media, particularly on LinkedIn; to carry out more activities with youth, both at schools and on campus; and to take part in conferences that focus on the SDGs.

The network will be hosting its own conference in August and will be themed on SDG 5 – Gender Equality. “But related SDGs will be addressed as well, including women in law, women in education and women in all areas pertaining sustainability,” Morely says.

“I enjoy helping people,” Morley says. “That’s just who I am, and it made sense for me to do community development work.” Yet she does not only have the right mindset for the position – she brings a wealth of experience, too.

For six years, she headed Discovery’s corporate social investment, implementing its project in the Orange Farm informal settlement in partnership with local government, working on youth skills development, strengthening health systems, and enterprise and supplier development. The project was part of the corporation’s employee volunteer programme.

“What I won’t forget is the power of the partnership with the non-profit organisation who provided training support at the entrepreneurship hub we launched,” Morley recalls. “When leaders are committed, it doesn't matter which sector you’re from, you can make a significant difference. You need to commit to the cause, not to who else is involved in the cause.”

This flagship project became the basis for her master’s in Development Practice with which she graduated cum laude from UP in 2020. She also clinched a UP Merit Award for Research for her thesis, ‘Addressing the Sustainable Development Goals in Africa through responsible leaders: The case of a multi-stakeholder partnership in Orange Farm”.

Prior to joining the network, she was the director of programmes for the Trevor Noah Foundation. She described the famous South African comedian and former talk show host, now based in the US, as a “lovely, committed human being, really committed to education, to what the Trevor Noah Foundation does, which is to be a beacon of hope in a community”.

The one problem with Morley’s community-based activities is that setting out to save the world does not leave her with much downtime. Besides her new high-profile job, she is also doing a PhD on leadership development for sustainability. Plus she is a supervisor for ALLI masters’ students.

She admits relaxing is not high on her list of activities. She reads late at night, but journal articles and a book on leadership don’t fit the bill of recreation. They are more PhD-related. But then Morley is not easily detracted from her studies. “It's a personal goal, which I'm not going to let go of,” she says. Watching an occasional Netflix reality series is one of her few mindless pleasures.