MDGs Post 2015

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, agreed to launch a process to develop a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs). The conference did not specifically add detail to the goals, targets, and implied indicators, but tasked a 30-member Open Working Group (OWG) of the General Assembly to prepare a proposal on the SDGs. After 13 sessions of meeting from March 2013 to July 2014, the OWG has finalized a set of proposed 17 goals and 169 targets as the UN development agenda beyond 2015.

Panduan ini kiranya juga diharapkan akan mendorong upaya–upaya yang lebih baik dari Pemerintah, untuk dapat melaksanakan Agenda SDGs dan bagi masyarakat sipil juga dapat dimanfaatkan untuk membantu memperkuat upaya–upaya advokasi yang selama ini telah dilakukan.

One of the major scholarly challenges of social entrepreneurship is the lack of an established episte-mology that partly contributes to and/or stems from a conflict of discourses. This study is an attempt to pave the way for the enhancement of the field of social entrepreneurship, using Schumpeter's perspective developed in his magnum opus " Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung " , by highlighting the role it can play in transforming business into an engine for sustainable development with an emphasis on the role that social enterprises can play. The study employs concepts of corporate citizenship , social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, social enterprise, and sustainable development to form a robust conceptual understanding of the field. A canvas alongside a set of tools are developed to enlighten the way towards achieving sustainable development. The study is primarily of interest to socioeconomic policy makers and social entrepreneurship scholars and benefits social and business enterprises as well. The implications of the canvas are tripartite. Firstly, the canvas demonstrates the main elements of the current socioeconomic ecosystem and how they could work in unison towards the realization of sustainable development agenda. Secondly, it helps to connect diverse yet related concepts in a pragmatic manner and, as a result, lays the foundation for the realization of Sustainable Development Goals of post-2015 development agenda of the United Nations with an emphasis on the role of social enterprises. Thirdly, the canvas, in conjunction with the concomitant analyses, helps companies to understand the level of maturity and integration of their sustainable and responsible strategies. Finally, the study highlights the role social enterprises and sustainable businesses can play in achieving Sustainable Development Goals.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that expired in 2015. Like the MDGs, the SDGs seek to fight against poverty and hunger, promote human rights, and empower all in the society especially women and girls. To support the achievement of the SDGs by African countries, the International Association, Pan African Institute for Development (PAID), during its 47 th Governing Council Meeting held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso on the 16 th – 17 th of December 2015 discussed " Africa's development challenges and PAID's response ". The Meeting notes that Africa's development challenges are numerous and multi-faceted. Hence, timely achievement of the SDGs will require an integrated multi-stakeholder approach. This paper reviews the progression from the MDGs to the SDGs, particularly key weaknesses of the MDGs that have been strengthened in the SDGs agenda, and makes proposals for enriching the SDGs further with PAID's guiding principle of concerted, decent and sustainable development. The paper further discusses how PAID can support implementation of the SDGs agenda through a variety of training activities, research and development programs, and consultancy/support services.

Given that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expire this year, there is no better time to reflect and critical evaluate their impact on global development. The MDGs do not formally make mention of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) not until 2007, six years into the MDG era. The idea of SRH and reproductive rights was introduced in 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). In practice, SRH concept is seen to be central to the general well-being of all peoples. Unlike the ICPD, the MDGs do not formally target SRH comprehensively. The sector-specific paradigm in which the MDGs were predicated steered the pursuit of these goals away from multi-sectorality in programme planning and implementation at the national level giving rise to vertical programming.
Hence, the MDGs might have created a dichotomy between HIV and SRH both by the adoption of a narrow vision of SRH only as maternal health and of HIV. This might have impacted negatively on the delivery and uptake of both HIV services and the broader SRH services in practice. While certain areas of SRH like HIV and maternal care have undoubtedly received increased funding, the opposite is the case for the other areas like contraception. In fact from 2000-2007, aid for family planning actually plummeted in proportional and absolute terms in spite of its centrality in preserving SRH of all peoples. It could be concluded that aid for broader SRH services declined in the MDG era at the expense of increases in that for HIV and maternal health. As we await the advent of the sustainable development goals, the right-based approach to comprehensive SRH services must be re-espoused for a lasting impact especially in resource poor settings.

BOOK REVIEW by Vibhuti Patel
Human Development in an Unequal World by K. Seeta Prabhu and Sandhya S. Iyer, 2019,
Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. xxiii+370, Price: Rs. 1250/- ISBN: 0-19-949024-4
This volume is an exhaustive academic endeavour to contextualise human development in a world which is unequal and promotes unfreedoms as a result of socio-political, cultural, and educational inequalities and multiple marginalities based on caste, class, race, ethnicity, postcoloniality and gender. The authors have provided deep insights on the concept of Human Development (HD) developed by Prof. Mahbub-ul-Haq and expounded by Indian Nobel laureate Prof. Amartya Sen and, popularised by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through its regular publication of Human Development Reports since 1990.

Although the recently approved Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) explicitly mention access to water, health and education as universally guaranteed human rights, access to affordable and sufficient food is not given such recognition. The SDGs road map assumes that market mechanisms will suffice to secure nutritious and safe food for all. We question how and why the right to food has disappeared from such an international agreement and we will provide insights on the likely causes of this and the options to make good on such a regrettable omission. Analysis of political stances of relevant western stakeholders, such as the United States (US) and the European Union (EU), is also included.

We need a new social contract whereby food is considered a commons and nutrition a public good, a necessary narrative to develop universal food coverage schemes at national level similar to those of health and education. The supply/demand rules will never get rid of hunger in the world as aspired by the post-2015 yet-to-be agreement, since the market does not have any incentive to provide food access to those who do not have money to pay for an essential resource. Re-commoning food would imply that hunger eradication would not solely be the State’s duty, as social enterprises and local communities should also live up to their obligations (food citizens instead of food customers).

Social goals tend to be marginalized in the implementation of sustainable development while economic growth is prioritized often also at the cost of ecological goals. Many of these development issues are essentially distributional issues.These distributional challenges will be exacerbated by the need to limit the environmental utilization space (ecospace) on Earth and the consequent challenge of how this space will be equitably and inclusively shared among countries and people. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets developed by the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG) against criteria for inclusive development.
Inclusive development principles, tools, and evaluation criteria for the proposed SDGs fall into three clusters: inclusive development per sé; inclusive development in the context of the Anthropocene; and inclusive development from a relational perspective.
Regarding inclusive development per sé, the SDGs currently proposed do not provide guidance to establish targets that would build capacity for the most marginalized populations so that they can learn about and access SDG-related opportunities. In the context of the Anthropocene, the SDGs neither adequately address ecosystemic limits nor the allocation of responsibilities, rights, and risks among countries and peoples in relation to fixed and diminishing resources. From a relational perspective, the wording of the OWG document lacks balance; it focuses more on effects than root causes. For example, while the document focuses on enhancing the rights of women and girls and ending gender disparities, it does not have a corresponding discussion on the policy instruments needed for dealing with the relations between men and women with respect to these rights.
These governance issues can be addressed by developing context-relevant, appropriate targets and indicators, but this will require exceptional steering and leadership to ensure their successful implementation.

The paper covers the related subjects of Agriculture, Horticulture, Plant Nutrition, On-Farm Soil, and Water Conservation and Herbs, Spices, Condiments, and Essential Oil/ Aromatic Plants. It discloses the fact that there is plenty of room for improvement both vertically as well as horizontally. The present fertilizer regime that is in use is not only wasteful it is also insufficient to meet the demands of the crop as well as causes actual physical harm to the environment. Subsistence agriculture, as is presently being practiced, can be replaced with Rational Agriculture. This type of Agriculture provides Integrated Crop Management as a tool for greater yields and added returns. At the same time, it ensures that there is no harmful fallout that adversely affects the environment. Sustainable Agriculture and its related fields of water and soil conservation form the first two of the fourteen core areas of the National Conservation Strategy. The objectives of the Sarhad Provincial Conservation Strategy are covered in the first two and the final 7th objective. Thus the importance of this subject cannot be over-emphasized.

The UN and partner agencies have made brave efforts to define learning targets for post-2015 that may be flexible and adapted by interested countries.  The targets are too vague to guide countries, and their potential fulfillment would also come too late in the lives of students.  However, use of little-understood memory functions, such as automaticity, helps specify reading and potentially math targets.  If students are to develop 21st century skills and critical thinking, they must learn to read and calculate rapidly in grades 1-2.

The role of local governance within global development is approaching an important inflection point. To the extent that local governments function as effective platforms for collective local decision-making and as effective mechanisms for promoting the collective interests of their constituents, local governments are ideal partners for achieving development success. Moreover, regardless of the mechanism or type of decentralization or “localization” that is ultimately chosen, in the end, we cannot ignore the vertical governance mechanisms and multilevel service delivery mechanisms that are needed to ensure the effective delivery of public services at the local level.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that expired in 2015. Like the MDGs, the SDGs seek to fight against poverty and hunger, promote human rights, and empower all in the society especially women and girls. To support the achievement of the SDGs by African countries, the International Association, Pan African Institute for Development (PAID), during its 47 th Governing Council Meeting held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso on the 16 th – 17 th of December 2015 discussed “Africa’s development challenges and PAID’s response”. The Meeting notes that Africa’s development challenges are numerous and multi-faceted.  Hence, timely achievement of the SDGs will require an integrated multi-stakeholder approach. This paper reviews the progression from the MDGs to the SDGs, particularly key weaknesses of the MDGs that have been strengthened in the SDGs agenda, and makes proposals for enric...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a common set of development targets that have influenced the priorities of many governments, donor, development agencies and other development stakeholders were adopted by 189 world leaders from rich and poor countries, as part of the Millennium Declaration which was signed in 2000. There is a flurry of stakeholder discussions and consultations towards establishing a new set of goals to replace the MDGS as the 15 years period set for this global development vision elapses by the close of 2015. There is significant global disparity in the achievement of these goals with countries in Sub Saharan countries recording low in most evaluations and surveys. This has been partly due to the fact that these broad international policy agendas have not been fully translated into concrete actions tied to regional and national realities in the different target sectors that are drivers of global development including environmental sustainability. In most of the discussions geared towards arriving at proposals that would inform the post-2015 agenda, there have been calls for more obligations on rich countries in areas such as climate change and resource consumption. In this investigative paper, the water sector is considered given that its importance to the ecosystem and human health cannot be over emphasized. It is observed that six out of the eight MDGs are directly or indirectly hinged on the availability of water and the factors that affect its availability including climate change and population growth as depicted in table 1 below, adapted from a UN 2006 report. However, at eave of the deadline of the MDGs, renowned global reports on the evaluation of targets in this sector have been overly stated, given that access to the resources continues to fall especially in Sub Saharan Africa.

Background
Global health institutions increasingly recognize that the right to health should guide the formulation of replacement goals for the Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015. However, the right to health’s contribution is undercut by the principle of progressive realization, which links provision of health services to available resources, permitting states to deny even basic levels of health coverage domestically and allowing international assistance for health to remain entirely discretionary.

Discussion
To prevent progressive realization from undermining both domestic and international responsibilities towards health, international human rights law institutions developed the idea of non-derogable “minimum core” obligations to provide essential health services. While minimum core obligations have enjoyed some uptake in human rights practice and scholarship, their definition in international law fails to specify which health services should fall within their scope, or to specify wealthy country obligations to assist poorer countries. These definitional gaps undercut the capacity of minimum core obligations to protect essential health needs against inaction, austerity and illegitimate trade-offs in both domestic and global action. If the right to health is to effectively advance essential global health needs in these contexts, weaknesses within the minimum core concept must be resolved through innovative research on social, political and legal conceptualizations of essential health needs.

Summary
We believe that if the minimum core concept is strengthened in these ways, it will produce a more feasible and grounded conception of legally prioritized health needs that could assist in advancing health equity, including by providing a framework rooted in legal obligations to guide the formulation of new health development goals, providing a baseline of essential health services to be protected as a matter of right against governmental claims of scarcity and inadequate international assistance, and empowering civil society to claim fulfillment of their essential health needs from domestic and global decision-makers.

The international community plans to adopt a post-2015 agenda based on two previous agendas – the MDGs and the SDGs. This merger is motivated by similarities in their goals and the need for improved global governance. Both agendas are ill-defined and a gap exists between ends and means. The new unique agenda has numerous and varied goals which are potentially in conflict. Developed countries might face a dilemma between altruistic aid policies and the need for tied aid to encourage transformation towards a green economy. However, it can be argued that the new agenda provides scope for political compromise and flexibility.