The Sustainable Development Report (formerly known as the SDG Index and Dashboards) is a global assessments of countries’ progress towards achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.
According to a UN statement the “implementation of the 2030 Agenda requires the active mobilisation of political leadership and ambition for science-based transformations. This must be achieved globally – leaving no country, society or person behind. The report is an invitation to embrace transformations with the urgency needed to accelerate progress towards the SDGs.” – https://sdgs.un.org/gsdr/gsdr2023
Fellow Nozipho Tshabalala (Class XIII: Akani) felt privileged to host the regional launch of the SDG Report 2023, where she also facilitated “the regional operationalization” workshop over two days. “The world is halfway into the 2030 Agenda, and it’s time for Africa to make its mark!,” she added.
During this workshop, representatives explored all possible ways to support our government and stakeholders in implementing the report’s recommendations, in order to get back on track for those vital Sustainable Development Goals to be implemented.
Nozipo explained that the UN Department of Economic & Social Affairs and the German Development Agency (Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)) led this important work for the continent, “BMZ and UN are partners, with BMZ providing the funding and delivery support for the workshop and UN, especially UNDP, providing the expertise (economists etc) to provide input into the content of the workshop. The report is compiled by an independent group of scientists, which includes some participants from the UN system, but not exclusively.”
What transpired during the course of the two day workshop highlighted the South African government’s lack of serious commitment to sustainable development and transformation of our society. South Africa’s level of commitment was scored as moderate and in many areas, we were worse off than in 2019 when the previous report was published.
“Like other targets where we are not making the desired progress, it is largely due to funding and investment gaps, poor policy choices and a low ability to execute against national plans.” Nozipho commented.
Status of SDG targets for South Africa (% trend indicators)
- 33% on track
- 39% stagnation / limited progress
- 28% worsening
(Click here to see SA’s dashboard: https://dashboards.sdgindex.org/profiles/south-africa)
The area of most concern is SA’s worsening state of education.
Since the previous report, our score for delivering quality education is decreasing, because
- the primary school enrolment rate is down
- and the completion of high school rate is down.
According to Nozipho our SDG progress is prevented by a lack of buy-in from stakeholders. “It seems we still think that the SDGs are a “UN thing”, with partners fiddling at the periphery. For example, private sector reporting against the SDGs is not yet completely mainstream and integrated into business models. We should be there by now, with only a few years to go to 2030.”
The main goal of the workshop? “I don’t think the workshop was about renewing commitments but rather about trying to accelerate execution. I think it surfaced some of the execution challenges, and with that – hopefully – some pathways to delivery were cleared. Only time will tell,” Nozipho concluded.
