Nigeria And The Sustainable Development Goals: Setting The Course To 2030

President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari addresses the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly September 28, 2015 at the United Nations in New York. AFP PHOTO/DON EMMERT

In September this year, under a relatively quiet banner, the Sustainable Development Goals (“SDGs”) were announced as part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Created to replace the expiring Millennium Development Goals (“MDGs”), the SDGs build upon the tenets of its predecessor in addressing the many cruel dimensions of poverty; combatting inequality and injustice more holistically; and widening the breadth of the environmental targets to tackle climate change.

Despite the positive development of the SDGs,

the relatively muted response to their announcement reinforces the fact that the MDGs largely missed their mark. The MDGs succeeded in creating public discourse and building a firm platform for organising international development priorities around a set of unified objectives. However, they suffered greatly from the “soft bigotry of low expectations”; being conceived and executed exclusively by Western governments and organisations – who then sought to socially engineer huge changes in developing countries from the comfort of sky scrapers in New York. In retrospect, the MDGs were doomed to fail from the moment it was decided to exclude emerging markets from deciding on the goals and solutions for themselves.

As I am an advocate of emerging market autonomy and indigenous-led development, I have been greatly encouraged by the SDGs, which are a significant improvement on the MDGs in a number of ways. Firstly, this long list of 17 goals (as opposed to the MDGs five), sub-goals, targets and suggestions were derived from a global consultation with leadership from developing countries. Secondly, and as a direct result of the first point, there is a radical change in the discourse around development to include a focus on global poverty, as opposed to just emerging market poverty, seeking to identify causes and solutions for poverty across all nations. Thirdly, the SDGs make it clear that the private sector will be one of the main engines in achieving these goals as sustained economic resilience requires private sector participation on a grand scale. The result of this is a global data resource/guide and a menu of targets that can be tailored by indigenous public and private sector organisations, in each market, to suit their reality.

For the UN and other leading Western development organisations to recognise at an institutional level that the indigenes of all countries are both best placed to and entirely capable of setting their own goals and targets, is a huge step forward. In fact, in this “SDG era”, Western institutions and groups are partnering with local institutions and individuals as a key strategy for achieving the goals.

This change also puts the responsibility for developing their countries firmly back onto the shoulders of the citizens and governments of those countries. This is as important psychologically as it is politically and economically, particularly in regions like sub-Saharan Africa. This responsibility comes at a time when many of these countries, the most high profile example of which is Nigeria, are becoming real democracies. Young democracies filled with people empowered as much by the internet as by their own governments, determined to exercise their power and transform their countries over the next 15 years.