DEVELOPMENT GOALS (MDGs and SDGs)

MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS:

The Millennium Development Goals were eight international development goals set by the 189 UN member states in September 2000 and agreed to be achieved by the year 2015. All 189 United Nations member states, and at least 22 international organizations, were committed to help achieve the following Millennium Development Goals by 2015:

  1.     To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

  2.     To achieve universal primary education

  3.     To promote gender equality and empower women

  4.     To reduce child mortality

  5.     To improve maternal health

  6.     To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases

  7.     To ensure environmental sustainability

  8.     To develop a global partnership for development

BACKGROUND:

The Millennium Declaration was signed at the September global summit held at the UN headquarters in New York and the 149 international leaders in attendance committed to combating disease, hunger, poverty, illiteracy, discrimination against women and environmental degradation. The MDGs were derived from this Declaration, and specific indicators and targets were attached to them.

The implementation of these eight chapters of the Millennium Declaration was agreed to begin in 1st January 2001, and the UN agreed to be holding such summits every five years to assess its progress towards achieving the MDGs. The first follow-up to the Millennium Summit was held in 2005 at the 2005 World Summit.

Since 2001, the UN has given a lot of priority to the implementation of these MDGs, and though most of the targets had not been achieved by 2015, a substantial positive progress has been recorded over the 15 years.

ORIGIN:

Following the end of the Cold War, a series of UN‑led conferences in the 1990s had focused on issues such as children, nutrition, human rights and women, producing commitments for combined international action on those matters. The 1995 World Summit on Social Development produced a Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development with a long and complex list of commitments by global leaders, including many adapted from the outcomes of previous conferences. But international aid levels were falling and, in that same year, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD set up a reflection process to review the future of development aid. The resulting 1996 report, "Shaping the 21st Century", turned some of the Copenhagen commitments into six monitorable "International Development Goals", which had similar content and form to the eventual MDGs.

In late 1997, the UN General Assembly envisaged a special Millennium Assembly and forum as a focus for efforts to reform the UN system. A year later, it specifically resolved to hold not only the Millennium Assembly but also a Millennium Summit, and mandated the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, to come up with proposals for "a number of forward-looking and widely relevant topics". Annan's report, when published in April 2000 under the title "We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century", framed the questions of UN reform within the larger challenges facing the world, the chief of which was identified as "to ensure that globalization becomes a positive force for all the world’s people, instead of leaving billions of them behind in squalor". In the report Annan urged the forthcoming Millennium Summit to adopt certain key goals and objectives on many of the issues raised in the Copenhagen summit, other conferences of the 1990s, and the recently-published Brahimi Report on international peace and security.

The Millennium Summit and the General Assembly in September 2000 issued a Millennium Declaration echoing the agenda that Annan had set out. This declaration did not specifically mention "Millennium Development Goals", but it did contain the substance – and much of the same wording – as the eventual goals. A process of selecting and refining the Goals from the content of the Declaration continued for some time. In September 2001, Annan presented to the General Assembly a "Road map towards the implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration" which did contain a section specifically about "the Millennium Development Goals", enunciating some of them in their eventual wording, and indicating the remaining issues in formulating a definitive set.

WHY MDGs FAILED?

One of the key weaknesses of the MDGs was the way that they were written without the participation of the people whose lives they were meant to improve. This led to a whole host of problems. Several were based on statistics that were deeply flawed, and failed to take into account millions of people without identity papers or birth certificates. Others were too concerned with quantitative, rather than qualitative data.

The MDGs failed to ask important questions about why people were increasingly moving into cities, or what happens when people have an impossible choice between paying for clean water or their child’s education. The effect of creating targets to reduce such phenomena as extreme poverty by percentages, rather than eradicating them, has made life harder for those left behind by development projects that have targeted the easiest to reach, encouraging the stigmatization of people living in extreme poverty as being to blame for not taking advantage of the opportunities made available to them. If they had listened to people living in social exclusion in the global north, the drafters would have recognized that extreme poverty is a universal problem, not just an issue in developing countries.

Another key weakness, born out of the way they were put together, was the way the goals failed to encourage proper participation in development projects. As they are, they encourage some countries to push for economic growth to the detriment of people’s fundamental rights, and with no real focus on sustainability.

There was a relatively narrow range of developmental outcomes that were selected. For example, the focus of education on primary school enrolment came at the expense of retention of children (especially girls) in school and the quality of education. Within health, the MDG omitted important conditions such as non-communicable diseases, mental health, injuries and adolescent health. The MDG also did not consider disability (despite 15% of the world's people living with some form of disability). Also the goals only stated overall progress and did not specify reductions in inequity.

Perhaps, the most important lesson from the MDG that we need to take forward is the close interaction between health and the broader social determinants. We have a short window within which to more clearly outline the nature of these relationships and hence identify specific metrics to monitor and eventually hold stakeholders accountable for real changes to peoples’ lives. Doing so will require a better understanding, and implementation, of social determinants and human rights approaches and developing goals and targets to reflect this integration

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS:

The Sustainable Development Goals or Global Goals are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a "shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future". The SDGs were set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and are intended to be achieved by 2030. They are included in a UN-GA Resolution called the 2030 Agenda or what is colloquially known as Agenda 2030.

Here’s the 2030 agenda:

 1.     Eliminate Poverty

 2.     Erase Hunger

 3.     Establish Good Health and Well-Being

 4.     Provide Quality Education

 5.     Enforce Gender Equality

 6.     Improve Clean Water and Sanitation

 7.     Grow Affordable and Clean Energy

 8.  Create Decent Work and Economic Growth

 9.   Increase Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

 10.   Reduce Inequality

 11.   Mobilize Sustainable Cities and Communities

 12.   Influence Responsible Consumption and Production

 13.  Organize Climate Action

 14.  Develop Life Below Water

 15.  Advance Life On Land

 16.  Guarantee Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions

 17.  Build Partnerships for the Goals

BACKGROUND:

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were born at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. The objective was to produce a set of universal goals that meet the urgent environmental, political and economic challenges facing our world.

The SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which started a global effort in 2000 to tackle the indignity of poverty. The MDGs established measurable, universally-agreed objectives for tackling extreme poverty and hunger, preventing deadly diseases, and expanding primary education to all children, among other development priorities.

For 15 years, the MDGs drove progress in several important areas: reducing income poverty, providing much needed access to water and sanitation, driving down child mortality and drastically improving maternal health. They also kick-started a global movement for free primary education, inspiring countries to invest in their future generations. Most significantly, the MDGs made huge strides in combatting HIV/AIDS and other treatable diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.

ORIGIN:

In 1972, governments met in Stockholm, Sweden, for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment to consider the rights of the family to a healthy and productive environment.

In 1983, the United Nations created the World Commission on Environment and Development (later known as the Brundtland Commission), which defined sustainable development as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

In 1992, the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) or Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, where the first agenda for Environment and Development, also known as Agenda 21, was developed and adopted.

In 2012, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), also known as Rio+20, was held as a 20-year follow up to UNCED. Colombia proposed the idea of the SDGs at a preparation event for Rio+20 held in Indonesia in July 2011.

 In September 2011, this idea was picked up by the United Nations Department of Public Information 64th NGO Conference in Bonn, Germany. The outcome document proposed 17 sustainable development goals and associated targets. In the run-up to Rio+20 there was much discussion about the idea of the SDGs. At the Rio+20 Conference, a resolution known as "The Future We Want" was reached by member states. Among the key themes agreed on were poverty eradication, energy, water and sanitation, health, and human settlement.

The Rio+20 outcome document mentioned that "at the outset, the OWG (Open Working Group) will decide on its methods of work, including developing modalities to ensure the full involvement of relevant stakeholders and expertise from civil society, Indigenous Peoples, the scientific community and the United Nations system in its work, in order to provide a diversity of perspectives and experience".

In January 2013, the 30-member UN General Assembly Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals was established to identify specific goals for the SDGs. The Open Working Group (OWG) was tasked with preparing a proposal on the SDGs for consideration during the 68th session of the General Assembly, September 2013 – September 2014.

On 19 July 2014, the OWG forwarded a proposal for the SDGs to the Assembly. After 13 sessions, the OWG submitted their proposal of 8 SDGs and 169 targets to the 68th session of the General Assembly in September 2014.

 On 5 December 2014, the UN General Assembly accepted the Secretary General's Synthesis Report, which stated that the agenda for the post-2015 SDG process would be based on the OWG proposals.

Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary-General from 2007 to 2016, has stated in a November 2016 press conference that: "We don't have plan B because there is no planet B." This thought has guided the development of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Post-2015 Development Agenda was a process from 2012 to 2015 led by the United Nations to define the future global development framework that would succeed the Millennium Development Goals. The SDGs were developed to succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which ended in 2015.

The UN-led process involved its 193 Member States and global civil society. The resolution is a broad intergovernmental agreement that acts as the Post-2015 Development Agenda. The SDGs build on the principles agreed upon in Resolution A/RES/66/288, entitled "The Future We Want". This was a non-binding document released as a result of Rio+20 Conference held in 2012.

Negotiations on the Post-2015 Development Agenda began in January 2015 and ended in August 2015. The negotiations ran in parallel to United Nations negotiations on financing for development, which determined the financial means of implementing the Post-2015 Development Agenda; those negotiations resulted in adoption of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda in July 2015.

SHORTCOMINGS OF SDGs:

One issue that was brought up repeatedly was the fact that SDGs are voluntary. Even though every country promised to work on the SDGs, there are no consequences if they do not. So far, America and Russia have done the least out of all the countries to achieve the SDGs. There is simply no incentive for countries to achieve SDGs other than the fact that they want to.

The SDGs build on the MDGs and continue to focus on the idea of eradicating extreme poverty and do not address the fundamental question of human dignity and justice for all. Poverty cannot be eradicated without focusing on justice.

The Agenda 2030 talks of a human rights framework but falls short of integrating it as a fundamental principle of the new goals. These new goals have a more nuanced understanding of social exclusion and most marginalized communities but again falls short of really putting the last first and prioritizing excluded groups including religious minorities

Another issue that is weakening the SDGs is the fact that corruption is rampant in poor countries. SDGs are aimed at lower income and poor countries as they need it the most. However, in these countries, corruption is often rampant. Funds that are given to these countries to help them achieve SDGs are being mismanaged. The funds are being used for personal and private uses. However, it is not just poor and low-income countries that deal with money being diverted. In highly developed countries, the same thing happens, but with a different angle.

The agenda 2030 is still an agenda for addressing the manifestation of poverty, exclusion and unsustainable growth. It is not bold enough to directly address the real drivers of poverty or the fundamental causes of poverty like extractive industries; unequal terms of trade; undemocratic global governance architecture; shrinking and privatization of public services including education and health; military-industrial complex; and market fundamentalism.

One final issue is the difficulty of language. United Nations operates with only six languages, which are Arabic, English, French, Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, and Spanish. That means in many countries where most of the population don’t speak any of these languages, it will be difficult to translate the SDGs. It is going to take additional time and effort to translate and educate the population.

Finally, there is not enough data to show clear results on how effective the SDGs are. Not enough countries have departments where they monitor SDG achievements and produce data to show what is being done.