Developing countries would have been able to finance SDGs if… – UN

The United Nations says, developing countries would have been able to finance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) if rich countries were meeting their 2002 target to put 0.7 per cent of gross national income into overseas aid, the United Nations said on Monday.

In a press release issued in Nairobi and copied to ghanabusinessnews.com, UNCTAD Secretary-General, Mukhisa Kituyi was cited as saying that if rich countries had consistently met the 0.7 per cent target since 2002, then developing countries would have been $2 trillion better off.

“The 0.7 per cent target will be a hard sell for many rich Governments, but these are a daring, ambitious set of Goals, and they require an equally ambitious response.

The Sustainable Development Goals represent the outcome of long, serious discussions on how we want our world to look in 2030, but this vision needs serious finance,” he said.

The release indicated that in 2015, the international community tasked UNCTAD and four other organizations to identify the means to finance the Sustainable Development Goals, through its Addis Ababa Action Agenda. The other organizations are the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.

By focusing on the Sustainable Development Goals, this year’s report reflects the international focus on the new Goals, putting numerical values on roughly a third of the Goals’ 230 indicators. It also generated the $2 trillion figure and highlighted some of the challenges in measuring progress on achieving the Goals, the release said.

The Goals have four times the number of indicators as their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals, UNCTAD Head of Statistics Steve MacFeely was cited as saying.

But even for the Millennium Development Goals, the global community was able to measure only 70 per cent of the indicators, the release added.

By Emmaniuel K. Dogbevi