Category: Sustainable Development Goals

During the September 2015 Sustainable Development Summit, hunger and food insecurity was one of the key topics of discussion, producing the SDG 2 – End Hunger and Achieve Food Security. Some targets were laid for this Sustainable Development Goal in a bid to achieve by 2030, to support some of the 1996 World Food Summit goals that never came to mature.

1. End the global hunger crisis and ensure all people, especially the poor, have access to sufficient and nutritious food.

The United Nations does not view hunger as just the scarcity of food but also as the inability of individuals to obtain what the FAO refers to as nutritious food. Most families in the Sub-Saharan region cannot afford a balanced diet more than twice in a week, something the UN believes is the main culprit behind malnutrition in the region. The plans are thus that as much as access to food is the main goal, access to right foods be given equal attention.
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With the bang of a gavel, our leaders approved a 15-year plan to curb one of the world’s biggest headaches: poverty. The Sustainable Development Goal 1, alongside 17 others, was set by the UN on September 25, 2015, and is contained in chapter 3 of Agenda 21 of the Sustainable Development Summit of 2015.

According to the UN, poverty is the inability to get opportunities and choices, a violation of basic human rights and dignity. It translates to the lack of capacity to participate in society effectively. It is the inability to provide health care to a family, the lack of enough food and clothe for the children, the lack of a job to earn a living or enough land to grow food, and the inability to access credit. It means powerlessness, insecurity and individual, household and community exclusion. It implies vulnerability to violence, and it often means living in fragile or marginal environments, short of clean water and sanitation.

SDG 1 Offers a Complex Challenge

Agenda 21 emphasises that poverty is one of the most complex and multidimensional problems, originating from both the national and international domains. There doesn’t exist a common solution for global application. Instead, country-specific approaches to curb poverty and coordination of national and international efforts, in addition to the parallel procedure of creating a conducive international environment, are vital for a way out of this problem.
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The Millennium Development Goals expire at the end of 2015, and in their place, a new development structure will take over to scale the progress registered with the MDGs. This new development agenda is referred to as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Framework

The SDGs are the new, global set of 17 goals and 169 targets that UN member states will be expected to refer to when designing their national agendas and political policies for the next fifteen years – until 2030.

The sustainable development goals follow and expand on the MDGs, and have been structured based on a lengthy negotiation process led by the UN Statistical Commission and involving governments and development actors from across the globe to agree on the main priorities beyond 2015. (more…)

Sustainable Development Goals were basically formulated to ensure acceleration in global economic growth. The economic status of a country or region has its physical reflection in the quality of infrastructure in that particular country/region. The better the infrastructure the better the economy, and vice versa. As set in Sustainable Development Goal 9, the UN’s plan is to build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation in a bid to achieve substantial growth in incomes and productivity. The following targets, to be met by 2030, were set with regard to achievement of SDG 9:

1. Build quality, resilient, reliable and sustainable national regional and trans-border infrastructure to support human well-being and economic development, with more focus on equitable and affordable access for all.
2. Facilitate inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and substantially raise industry’s proportion of employment and GDP, in accordance with national circumstances, and double its share in low-income countries.
3. Promote the access of small-scale entrepreneurs, particularly in developing countries, to affordable financial services, including credit, and their assimilation into value markets and chains.

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