Browse by Theme: Citizen Voice & Participation

Today, ministers and senior diplomats from around the world meet with the UN, EU and states involved in the Syrian conflict for a high-level Conference (5 April) to identify ways forward on the crisis. This happens as news from Khan Sheikhoun in southern Idlib in Syria suggests that an aerial bombardment using chemical weapons has left over 50 dead, and the situation escalates across multiple besieged areas across the country. At the top of the agenda is the question of ‘reconstruction’ – yet what does ‘reconstruction’ mean in a country still at war?

Guest blog by Nelson Muffuh from the UN's Post-2015 Development Planning Unit: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was successfully adopted in September in New York by an unprecedented number of world leaders, and this is a huge achievement in the face of extensive negotiations and contributions from civil society and other stakeholders.

Bangladesh has been quite successful in working towards the Millennium Development Goals, even receiving a Millennium Development Goal Award in 2010 for its notable progress toward reducing child mortality (MDG 4). But how far did this progress reach? Does the way we measure progress fail to account for the experience of millions of the country’s poorest people?

A panel discussion on the implications of new Global Goals for Sustainable Development  to mark CARE International’s 70th Anniversary.

After the historic milestone that was the adoption of the goals on Day 1, Saturday was very much a day of celebration but there was also important work being done.

So we did it. On Friday the world gathered in New York, flags were raised for 193 countries including Palestine and the Vatican for the first time, and to universal acclamation the new Sustainable Development Goals were gavelled into existence. What had taken three years of hard negotiation, impassioned argument and long technical nit-picking were suddenly a reality.

When it comes to monitoring impact, the SDGs have got it wrong. National Statistics Offices have a central role, but official data in developing countries is often incomplete, inadequate and unreliable. It cannot tell the full story, especially in countries where paper-based systems struggle to reach the very people the SDGs are meant to help.