{"id":6469,"date":"2015-10-28T08:56:49","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T08:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=6469"},"modified":"2015-10-28T08:56:49","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T08:56:49","slug":"aid-and-the-sustainable-development-goals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2015\/10\/28\/aid-and-the-sustainable-development-goals\/","title":{"rendered":"Aid and the Sustainable Development Goals"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 17\u00a0SDGs<\/a> were launched by the UN on September 25th, to the usual\u00a0fanfare. \u00a0They are wordy, as I've noted<\/a> before, and as the Economist<\/a> has argued, some are so convoluted as to defy evaluation \u2013 which, perhaps, was the point.<\/p>\n

\"Most of the SDGs\u2019 predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), have been met, largely because of progress in China and India. But there were just eight of them, focused on cutting extreme poverty and improving health care and education, all clearly defined. \u00a0By contrast there are 17 SDGs and a whopping 169 \u201cassociated targets\u201d, covering world peace, the environment, gender equality and much, much more. Many are impossible to measure. ... A tighter focus and more precise definitions might have been wise.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a more recent posting, Beyond handouts<\/a><\/em>, The Economist has said that although targets are bloated, they do show how aid is changing for the better, and \"are part of an important shift in thinking about development that is making it both more ambitious and more realistic.\"<\/p>\n

The Economist's comments concluded:<\/p>\n

\"As the SDGs proliferate, donors are putting greater emphasis on measuring results and collecting data. \u00a0They need data to be more disaggregated and to know where the poor are concentrated, as well as their ages, how they live and what sort of work they do. \u00a0Advances in technology make this easier. \u00a0Satellites can more precisely determine where forests are thinning, for example, or where crops are thriving or wilting. \u00a0Among the SDG targets is one that calls for all births to be registered so that all children have legal identities, and their progress can be tracked. \u00a0What matters most is \u201cmeasuring need and measuring impact,\u201d says Michael Anderson, who runs CIFF<\/a> [Children\u2019s Investment Fund Foundation] and was previously Mr Cameron\u2019s special envoy for the UN\u2019s development goals. \u00a0Yet, he adds, of the 193 countries which have signed up to the SDGs\u2019 nutrition targets only 74 have enough data to assess whether they\u2019re on track to meet them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know so much better now what works and what doesn\u2019t work,\u201d says Mr Anderson. \u00a0\u201cAid is an ever-declining part of the story.\u201d \u00a0That, perhaps, is the SDGs\u2019 real message. \u00a0Unwieldy as they are, they are not just a call for more handouts. \u00a0The MDGs were meant to create a social safety net; the SDGs to be fit for an age in which the standard of living in a big chunk of the developing world is creeping towards the levels of rich countries. \u00a0The SDGs\u2019 boosters, though admitting they will be harder to measure than the MDGs, let alone meet, hail them for going \u201cbeyond aid.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wonder if\u00a0the Aid industry in the UK, and its educational fellow travellers, agree.<\/p>\n

.......................<\/p>\n

PostScript: Here's an Economist\u00a0exploration<\/a> of how implementation of the SDGs will likely intersect with religious thinking and activity \u2013 something we shall likely hear more of, no doubt, and at some length.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 17\u00a0SDGs were launched by the UN on September 25th, to the usual\u00a0fanfare. \u00a0They are wordy, as I've noted before, and as the Economist has argued, some are so convoluted as to defy evaluation \u2013 which, perhaps, was the point....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}