Haumba’s Trendy Thoughts

When the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted, Goal 16 was seen as truly transformative, formally linking, for the first time at the United Nations, development, peace, justice, and good governance. Some of its more ambitious targets include significantly reducing all forms of violence, ending abuse and violence against children, promoting the rule of law, reducing illicit financial flows and corruption, and developing accountable and transparent institutions. But Goal 16 was not adopted without controversy. Many countries argued against the interruption of peace and security, and even more so justice, considerations into the development sphere, and would have preferred that the goal be dropped altogether. Other countries maintained that this goal was central for them and that their support for the 2030 Agenda hinged upon it. Nearly three years later, progress on Goal 16 is uneven, and there is considerable doub...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are often called the people’s goals. The SDGs were born at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 with the objective of producing a set of universal goals that meet the urgent environmental, political and economic challenges facing our world. The SDGs substitute the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which started a global effort in 2000 to tackle the indignity of poverty. The MDGs established measurable, universally-agreed objectives for tackling extreme poverty and hunger, preventing deadly diseases, and expanding primary education to all children, among other development priorities. For 15 years, the MDGs drove progress in several important areas: reducing income poverty, providing much needed access to water and sanitation, driving down child mortality and drastically improving maternal health. They also kick-started a global movement for free primary education, inspiring countries t...