HLPF Side Event – Wednesday, July 11, 18:30-20:00 – UNHQ CR4
The combine MoI and FfD agendas should tackle the removal of many of the structural barriers to the socio-economic transformation and advance systemic reforms of global economic frameworks to realign them with the imperatives of human rights, gender justice, people-centeredness and sustainable development. Despite the high-level political promises of the 2030 Agenda, the world is off track to reach the SDGs, the cost being paid by all those people and communities that continue to be marginalized in the face of a world economy that is increasingly focused of its new frontiers of digitalization and dematerialization. The latest economic cyclical upturn, not generalized and mostly centred within the Global North, has been accompanied by an increase in hunger and the worsening in the profile of vulnerabilities, heightened carbon emissions, and the persistence of structural levels of inequalities between and within countries. Our economy fails when it downturns and fails us again when it moves forward.

The UK Government committed to reducing inequalities through Sustainable Development Goal 10. Three years later things aren’t on track but is the socio-economic duty the solution we need? Koldo Casla from Just Fair explains. 

By signing up to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, among other things, the UK Government committed to reducing inequalities.

The SDGs, with their 17 Goals and 169 Targets, set the world on a trajectory where we have eradicated poverty, reduced inequalities, halted the loss of biodiversity and combatted catastrophic climate change. Some call them an action plan for the world. But as our chapter on SDG 10 in Measuring up shows, three years later the UK’s chances of hitting the targets on reducing inequalities by 2030 are not looking too good.

Global civil society report assesses obstacles and contradictions in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda
New York, 9 July 2018: “The world is off-track in terms of achieving sustainable development and fundamental policy changes are necessary to unleash the transformative potential of the SDGs.” This is the main message of the Spotlight Report 2018, the most comprehensive independent assessment of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. The report is launched on the opening day of the High Level Political Forum at the United Nations in New York by a global coalition of civil society organizations and trade unions.

As key instruments to assess implementation of the 2030 Agenda, the UN secretariat has published The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2018 and a report on Progress Towards Sustainable Development Goals that should inform the ministers attending the High Level Political Forum of ECOSOC to be held mid-July in New York. Both publications aim to “provide a global overview of the current situation” of the SDGs, “based on the latest available data for indicators in the global indicator framework” and they include the same set of numbers and indicators, only differing in their presentation, the latter being more wordy and text-only and the former a collection of bullet points with ample use of graphs.

Jana Smiggels Kavková. Photo: Jan Sklenář / Czech Radio

Could it be the case that the Czech Republic has reached the Scandinavian level of development in terms of equality of men and women? If not, the planned transfer of resources from the field of gender equality makes little sense. Yet, the statistics and our position in international comparison indeed tell us the very opposite. Our society has a long way to go in terms of gender equality. But the leadership of Ministry of Labour and Social Affair is obviously quite content with the current state of affairs, since it plans to withdraw financial support for the promotion of equality of women and men in the labour market.