Where to start with the SDGs?

Development Matters SDGs

By Simon Scott, Counsellor, Statistics Directorate, OECD; Jeff Leitner, Fellow, New America and Managing Director, GreenHouse; and William Hynes, Co-ordinator, New Approaches to Economic Challenges programme, OECD

Simon-Scott
“The SDGs as a network of targets,” from David Le Blanc, “Towards integration at last?”, DESA Working Paper No. 141 ST/ESA/2015/DWP/141

The upside to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), signed off at a UN Leaders’ Summit in September 2015, was their inclusiveness. An Open Working Group of 30 nations worked for two and a half years to develop the Goals, meeting 13 times, sometimes for a week, and organising countless national and thematic consultations, stakeholder forums, and on-line and door-to-door surveys. Almost everyone who wanted a say in the SDGs could have one, and more often than not, their voices were heard.

This led to the downside of the Goals – their sheer breadth and volume. The Economist satirised the litany of SDG targets as “the 169 Commandments” – a line perhaps inspired by Bill Gates’ comment that the SDGs resembled the Bible, and that he would prefer to start with something simpler, “like the Ten Commandments.”

Two years later, the world has moved on to implementation. The UN, national governments and international organisations are all retooling to help the world achieve the SDGs. And the available resources, while not limitless, are very substantial. Official development assistance from OECD countries alone now exceeds USD 140 billion a year, and private philanthropy from NGOs and foundations is also increasing. Trillions of dollars are held by sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and private endowments with an interest in long-term stability and sustainable development.

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Infrastructure, jobs, good governance: Bringing Africans’ priorities to the G20 table

Development Matters Africa, SDGs , , , , , , ,

By Michael Bratton, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and African Studies at Michigan State University and senior adviser to Afrobarometer, and E. Gyimah-Boadi, Executive Director of Afrobarometer and the Ghana Center for Democratic Development

 

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Beyond the limelight and the headlines, the recent Group of 20 (G20) summit accomplished an important piece of business by launching the Compact with Africa. The next step is crucial: negotiating the priorities that the compact will address.

One key concept is that the compact is with – rather than for – Africa, implying that it will rely on true partnerships to pursue mutually agreed-upon goals.

With its contribution to a “20 Solutions” document presented to the G20 by a consortium of think tanks, the pan-African research network Afrobarometer is working to ensure that the compact will take into account what ordinary Africans say they want and need.

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Development in transition

Development Matters Development finance, SDGs

By Alicia Barcena, Stefano Manservisi and Mario Pezzini

3Understanding and supporting the development trajectories of countries have long been the driving force behind all of our careers. If we, as a global community, are serious now about ensuring prosperity for all through the universal and comprehensive 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), then we must close all remaining gaps. And this means changing the way we think about development policy.

We can all agree we should continue to focus primarily on those left the furthest behind. However pockets of fragility also remain in those economies that have succeeded in climbing the economic ladder. While income inequality between countries may have reduced, inequality within countries has in fact risen. More than 75% of people in developing countries are living in societies where inequalities are higher today than they were 25 years ago. In Namibia, for example, which is considered an upper middle-income country, just over a quarter of its poorest inhabitants are covered by social protections, whereas Malawi, considered a low-income country, covers over 40%.

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We must co-create the future we want to see

Development Matters Climate change, policy , , ,

By Emmanuel Faber, CEO of Danone 

Emmanuel Faber participated in the
2017 International Economic Forum on Latin America and the Caribbean

Danone
Photo credit: Lionel Charrier/Livelihoods Funds

In 1972, Danone founder Antoine Riboud made a speech to French industry leaders in which he declared that “corporate responsibility doesn’t end at the factory gate or the company door” and called on them to place “industry at the service of people.” Today his words seem self-evident; at the time they were revolutionary.

Now more than ever, we know that we can only thrive as a business when people and planet thrive. It’s simple: If we don’t protect the environment, we won’t be able to secure resources to make our products. If we don’t empower people and support decent living conditions, our supplier and consumer bases will shrink. We cannot escape this interdependence. So, at Danone, we embrace it. This means that, wherever we operate, we work to foster inclusive and sustainable development through co-creation — that is, working with coalitions of actors on the ground to develop hybrid solutions to concrete problems.

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Development Finance 2.0: Improving Conditions for Local Currency Financing

Development Matters Development finance , , , ,

By Harald Hirschhofer, Senior Advisor, TCX 1 

Development-Finance-shutterstock_524218915Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require very large investments measured in the trillions until 2030. To mobilise such amounts, policy makers try to crowd-in the private sector, its financial resources and its entrepreneurial creativity. But private sector engagement will not happen if risk-adjusted returns are perceived to be unattractive. While telecom and mobile banking have shown that achieving development goals also means good business, perceived risks in most other sectors and countries are still too high for expected economic returns.

That is why donors, recipients and development banks have been developing programs to lower and share risks, including policy and structural reform, technical assistance and information sharing, and providing financial de-risking instruments. Especially in situations where private investors perceive risks as higher than they actually are, such de-risking measures can be impactful in catalysing private investment flows. Accordingly, development finance institutions (DFIs) are expanding their focus from mere funding to blending risk tolerant donor funds with commercial capital to offer de-risking services and support for (perceived) high risk activities.

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Reimagining job-oriented education to give youth the chance of a better future

Development Matters Gender, Latin America/Caribbean, Youth , , , , ,

 By Mariana Costa, Co-founder and CEO of Laboratoria

 To find out more on youth and inclusive development, go to the 2017 International Economic Forum on Latin America and the Caribbean website

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Laboratoria graduates. Photo credit: the Laboratoria website

Receiving quality higher education in Latin America is still a privilege, with two-thirds of youth in the region lacking advanced technical, professional and management skills. Despite their limited access, acquiring these valuable skills is still the main vehicle to a career. The consequences are not minor. According to OECD data, 21% of youth are not working or studying, and another 19% are working in the informal economy. All of them face limited opportunities to fulfil or even discover their potential. A better way must be found to give the region’s young talent a path to professional growth.

A few years ago, I started a web development company in Lima, Peru. In the process of building our team of software developers, my partners and I discovered what appeared to be a loophole in the system. Most of these coding professionals, making competitive salaries and facing endless opportunities for career growth, did not have a fancy degree from a renowned university. They were self-taught developers, university dropouts or computer engineering graduates from obscure technical institutes. Despite the lack of a degree, they were doing great. And they were not the only ones. According to Stack Overflow’s 2016 survey, 56% of developers do not have a college degree in computer science or related fields. In tech, the key to a high paying job often has more to do with what you can build than where you studied.

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Fiscal space in developing countries: It’s about revenues

Development Matters Development finance ,

By Alexander Pick, Fiscal economist, OECD Development Centre

planting-moneyFiscal space is big right now. It was an important part of the OECD’s policy prescriptions in last year’s Economic Outlook and was high on the World Bank President’s agenda at this year’s Spring Meetings in Washington. It also featured in discussions at the 2017 Forum on Financing for Development in May. Yet the term has a different meaning depending on whether it is applied to a developed or a developing country, and it doesn’t appear to resonate with policy makers at a national level.

So what does fiscal space mean for developed economies? The OECD and IMF view the concept in terms of long-term debt sustainability. By this approach, fiscal space is interpreted as the distance between actual debt levels and a theoretical higher level of debt that is nonetheless safe. Fiscal space suggests how much wiggle-room national governments have to increase growth-enhancing spending, such as infrastructure investment, without raising taxes. This is important in the current context of a sluggish global economy where monetary policy has done all it can to support growth and the pressure is thus on fiscal policy and structural reform to propel the recovery.

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