The High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) was held from Monday, 8 July, to Wednesday, 17 July 2024, at the United Nations headquarters in New York. It’s easy to dismiss the HLPF as just another useless meeting – but that is too simplistic a take. The HLPF is in principle important because it has a central role in checking how the world is progressing against the sustainable development goals – all 17 of them, first drawn up to big fanfare in 2015, and due to be achieved by 2030.
Most of the headlines coming out of the HLPF were – perhaps unsurprisingly – all doom and gloom, with the world being very “off track”. With 43 countries presenting their updates on how well they have achieved a selected five of the SDGs so far, and 15 of these being from Africa – you’d probably expect all of them to be fairly similar and highly pessimistic as well.
However, that would be an overly simplistic take. As our infographic explains below, there was no single story for the presenting African countries…. With some African countries being very close to achieving most and others being far behind. But they were also not always behind the rest of the world. For example, 73% of the African reporting countries have or are formally exploring net-zero commitments, despite bearing the brunt of climate challenges due to the high emissions of wealthier nations. Some of the African and other reporting countries also explained how fulfilling SDG 16 – strengthening their institutions such as parliaments – has been helpful to effectively addressing their development issues.
But where they were united was in expressing their disappointment around SDG 17, – the goal jock is about global partnerships – and in particular emphasizing that Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) – which has been a UN commitment since 1974 – was still extremely low, and a major reason why some countries were still behind on SDGs because of a lack of finance. They also urged wealthier nations to contribute more to the achievement of the SDGs through their trade and investment patterns.
That’s why our takeaway from the HLPF was that other African countries should be encouraged by the fifteen nations that committed to report to this years forum, but keep using this forum to push the rest of the world to be more helpful. We also reflected on the fact that progress was hardly reported, and hope that this might change next year. Nigeria, Ghana and Eswatini may well report into next year’s HLPF, so we should watch this space – and prepare to debunk harmful stereotypes towards African member states and their commitment to the SDGS.
Read more about the African reporting on SDGs in our graphics below.
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Special thanks go to Ivory Kairo and Teta Mukulira for their work on the graphics and for collecting/analysing the underlying data and this accompanying article. The data was only collected from: Voluntary National Reviews, World Bank Group Data, World Population Review.
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