By Janet McDickson
Abuja (Nigeria) – Nigeria is taking leadership position in Africa in an early effort at domestication and integration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through sub national mainstreaming; inter agency coordination and institutional strengthening.
Senior Special Assistant to the President on Sustainable Development Goals (SSAP-SDGs) Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire, made this known during the lunch of the ‘My World 2030’ at the margins of the Ministerial Segment at the 2016 United Nations High Level Political Forum in New York recently.
Adejoke urged that governments and citizens must jointly deploy the use of accountability mechanisms; pointing out that, this has been done successfully in Nigeria where civil society, private sectors and governments collaborates through a monitoring and evaluation framework designed to ensure the implementation of the SDGs, to enable deliver value for money with direct impact on the poor and the vulnerable.
She stated that there is no place for punitive accountability measures at the national, regional and global levels in the review and follow up at SDGs implementation.
‘My world 2016’ according to her played a central role in aggregating demands for the 2030 Agenda as it provides quantitative evidence that formed the basic building block for SDGs; saying, it will foster accountability and enhance public participation and multi stakeholders partnerships.
She however suggested that, the future of public participation should move beyond invitation and its associated flaws to one based and real time aggregation of passive information from citizens including data from new media. This she said has the potential of high lightening issues missed by traditional participation tools, avoiding the time lag that afflicts data collection across development fields.
Also at another forum, while presenting the Nigeria’s draft statement, the Senior Special Assistant said the successful implementation of 2030 Agenda would require full range of actions in terms of financial, non financial, public/private, domestic/international, as clearly detailed in the Addis -Abba Action Agenda which reaffirmed targets for Official Development Assistance (ODA).
She said Nigeria believes in the new global development agenda and must look beyond ODA and emphasize the need for the global community to provide necessary support to the developing countries in critical areas of domestic resource mobilization. She added that, “Nigeria places premium on the place of partnerships, science, technology and innovation, data, monitoring and accountability as well as policy and institutional coherence as veritable means of implementation needed to accelerate the attainment of SDGs”.
Furthermore, she called for increased South-South, North-South and triangular cooperation in order to harness the wealth available across member states and equitably channel them to venerable regions for the attainment of the SDGs, ensuring that no one is left behind in the process. She continued that Nigeria is calling for a fairer policies, better tariff regimes, appropriate pricing, and beneficiation, fairer share of natural resource rent, technology facilitation with a relaxation of laws on bio-technology, patent and intellectual property in order to curtail the culture of dependency.
She sums up that, while Nigeria pledges to continue the use of Debt Relief Gains as additional funding to strengthen the means of implementation for SDGs activities, emphasis is being placed on internal strategies, such as tax reforms, curtailing of illicit financial flows, diversification of economy to generate non oil revenues, efficiency in the use of internally generated revenues and disincentives for leakages.
Janet McDickson
AD, Information
Head Communication