Who will pay the SDG bill? Nations themselves
Mobilising domestic resources will be the key challenge to financing the sustainable development goals or SDGs, Luis Fernando Carrera Castro, Guatemala's ambassador to the United Nations, said yesterday.
Unlike the millennium development goals, there are no international commitments to funding the SDGs, said Carrera, who played an active role in the formulation of the new global goals that aim to eradicate poverty by 2030.
There will be no grants from the developed countries: whatever they will give will be loans, he said at a lecture on the SDGs and challenges before the countries like Bangladesh.
The Daily Star organised the lecture at its office, which was attended by senior journalists from newspapers and TV stations. Mahfuz Anam, editor and publisher of The Daily Star, moderated the programme.
Implementation will largely depend on a country's own resources, said Carrera, Guatemala's former foreign affairs minister.
Domestic resource mobilisation is a sovereign responsibility now, he said, while calling for alternative sources of financing as the implementation of the SDGs can be expensive for poor nations like Bangladesh.
Estimates show that achieving the new global goals will cost $5-7 trillion and likely shape the next 15 years of financing for development.
The Third International Conference on Financing for Development, which took place in Addis Ababa in July, emphasised the need to double tax revenues, double aid and provide $500 billion a year of innovative finance. New bilateral and multilateral sources of financing have to be created, said Carrera, also executive director of the Soros Foundation Guatemala.
He cited examples of multilateral lending agencies: the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. Also, the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is in place to support infrastructure development.
Brazil and China have produced some big financial institutions. There is the New Development Bank, formerly referred to as the BRICS Development Bank, which is a multilateral development bank operated by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, known as the BRICS, as an alternative to the existing American and European-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
The ultimate target of the new agenda, the negotiations for which went for over five years, is to “create a global middle-class without killing the planet”, he said.
“This may sound awkward, but a world with no hunger and with access to education and health can create this global middle-class.” Carrera, also an economist specialising in fiscal policy and political analysis, said there are major differences between MDGs and SDGs.
The first major difference is that the SDGs are a government and people's agenda. The second difference is that it is a political agreement, not a technical one.
The third and final major difference is that SDGs are not imposed by the north countries (developed) on the south.
“There was a strong influence of the global south and G77 (an organisation of 77 developing states that pursue common goals) plus China. This somehow created an environment.”
Yet, the effective implementation of the new set of global goals requires guidance of the UN, according to Carrera.
Member states want the UN to play a critical role, bring knowledge, support long-term vision and adopt national goals, accountability and data access, as it will help the governments achieve the goals.
Carrera also spoke about the issue of environmental sustainability, which, according to him, cannot be divorced from poverty eradication. “We want no poor people, but we also want sustainable development.”
He said the world needs to move on from fossil fuels to sustainable energy for the betterment of people.
Another critical issue in the implementation of SDGs is the engagement of the private sector in the process.
This time, the business community is not an observer, like it was in the case of MDGs, he said.
Carrera also found that the SDGs did not address certain issues like the socio-economic inequality, which is increasing for the last 40 years.
Also, there is not enough articulation on strengthening of the public institutions that will implement the policies. Poorly-managed and poorly-funded institutions cannot produce good results, he said.
The media has an important role to play as well, he said. “We need social and cultural changes and knowledge can be acquired through the media.”
They need to disseminate knowledge and promote new social values and awareness on the SDGs, Carrera said.
“The task is an ethical task; it's a new ethical standing.”
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