For success, goals must be tied to Vision 2030 blueprint

The 15-year global strategy to wipe out poverty, fight inequality and tackle climate change effects was ratified by global leaders at the United Nations Sustainable Development summit in New York last week.

The agenda was to set the world on a path of sustainability through adoption of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the 17 goals and 169 targets that aim at building on and expanding the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted at a UN summit in 2000.

A myriad of questions have been asked about the SDGs. Did the world need another set of goals? And, for a country like Kenya, what do the new goals pose for us as a country?

Specifically, who will logistically and financially champion their implementation, and where will (scarce) resources come from? How do they tie into our national development goals?

Complex questions indeed, and for some, only educated guesses would provide convincing answers. For others, however, Vision 2030 flagship projects, the second medium-term plan, and the recently launched industrial transformation programme tie the development of priority sectors to the SDGs.

This is perhaps due to the fact that, unlike the MDGs, the United Nations conducted what is now termed as the largest consultation programme in its history: a global survey on what the SDGs should include.

MANY CRITICS

Critics of SDGs are quite many. On the one hand countries like Japan and the United Kingdom argue that the goals are too many, but other countries are resisting their reduction.

The UN summit and endorsement of the 17 goals, however, implies consensus.

Opponents of MDGs opined lack of good governance in monitoring and evaluating country indicators. Likewise, the largest challenge for SDGs will be tracking and monitoring their development to ensure that all goals are implemented by all stakeholders. The elephant in the room is how implementation of these SDGs will be financed. For Kenya my guess is as good as yours: the country’s woes in being able to increase public teachers’ salaries couldn’t even bring one to scratch the surface on how SDGs will be financed.

Why the United Nations Development Programme has lauded the significant gains that Kenya made in most MDGs, progress towards realising the targets of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger (MDG 1), achieving environmental sustainability (MDG 7), and improving maternal health (MDG 5) has been wanting.

SDG 3 (ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages) gives Kenya the opportunity to build on existing initiatives under MDG 5 to improve maternal health in the country.

Also, according to the UNDP’s MDG acceleration framework and action plan, Kenya failed to achieve environmental sustainability (MDG 7) due to “high proportion of urban populations living in informal settlements, poor land use planning, diminishing forest cover and low water-per-capita” scores.

Interestingly, several of the 17 SDGs focus on environmental sustainability.

Meeting most of the SDG targets in the next 15 years will be no mean feat. The lack of set indicators and adequate finances to implement them means policy makers will require innovative strategies to meet these targets.

Coincidentally, the end of SDGs will also be the culmination of Kenya’s Vision 2030 economic blueprint. Perhaps for achievement of the SDGs policy paradigms will need emphasis on sustainability and inclusivity as prisms for implementation.

Ms Wang’ombe is a researcher at the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA). Views expressed here are her own, not the institute’s.