Almost two years ago, 193 Member States of the United Nations, including Moldova, adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This bold and universal Agenda already has many countries around the world taking action to improve people’s lives and plan for a sustainable future.
Over the past 20 years, the world has seen unprecedented progress of human development, as nearly 1.1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty. But unfinished business remains. Today, roughly 800 million people still live in extreme poverty and inequalities are growing.
Eradicating poverty remains a long-standing goal of global development. It’s also a centerpiece of the 2030 Agenda. And while no one would doubt the importance of this goal, a lingering question remains: how do we measure poverty and how do we best make use of poverty data?
We at the UN in Costa Rica are designing our next UN common plan for 2018-2022 to support the Government in its efforts to achieve the Global Goals by 2030. To do that, we are following the crowdsourcing spirit of the new development agenda. We are trying to adapt our decision making so that our new UN Development Assistance Framework is developed with the full wisdom of the crowd.
“How do you eat an elephant? One spoonful at a time.”
This saying applies to any undertaking whose size and proportions are immense. Where to start is daunting. For me, the Sustainable Development Goals — an ambitious set of goals agreed to by UN Members States that establishes milestones of growth & equality within the limits of the planet — are the elephant.
In 2016, the UN in Zambia launched the first Sustainable Development Partnership Framework (2016-2021), a strategic document to address some of the multi-dimensional development challenges faced by this emerging middle income country.
