South Centre presents its view on the Post-2015 Development Agenda and Sustainable Development.

The United Nations’ Post-2015 Development Agenda should not simply extend MDGs, or reformulate the goals, but focus instead on global systemic reforms to remove main impediments to development and secure an accommodating international environment for sustainable development.  This is a big, ambitious agenda which cannot be acted on overnight. An action plan for systemic reforms could be supplemented, but not substituted, by specific goals in some areas of economic and social development.

Photo. EquityBD.

Right based civil society networks in cooperation with different students’ cultural organizations of Dhaka University organize a seminar at the Nowab Ali Chowdhury Senate Building and a photo exhibition at the Teacher Student Centre (TSC) in Dhaka University. The vice chancellor of the university Mr. A A M S Arefin Siddique inaugurates the photo exhibition.

The latest report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Right to Water and Sanitation (“the Rapporteur”), Ms. Catarina de Albuquerque, focuses on the theme Sustainability and non-retrogression in the realization of the rights to water and sanitation. The report offers useful and welcome guidance for those seeking to draw meaning from the human right to water on the areas of finance, investment and other related economic ones. Some of its developments will arguably be useful beyond the right to water, charting a path for how to draw such meaning in the case of other rights.

The Special Rapporteur devotes a portion of her report to develop the concept that sustainability is “non-dissociable” from human rights law.

The Palestinian Non-governmental Organizations Network  PNGO  raised concerns and warned of a dangerous deterioration in the humanitarian  situation in the Gaza Strip due to severe drop-long power cuts caused by the fuel outage.

PNGO stated that power outage in the besieged Gaza Strip seriously affects basic life facilities in particular health , water, education and sanitation as well as vital sectors.

Social Watch Philippines (SWP), Silliman University in Negros Oriental and Mindanao State University (MSU) in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) launched the People’s Public Finance Institute (PPFI), which is the first-ever center on teaching citizens to learn and be actively involved in public finance in the Philippines.

“As part of Social Watch Philippines’ commitment to asserting social development for people’s rights and empowerment, we are setting up PPFI centers in various State Colleges and Universities (SUCs) all over the country,” said former national treasurer and SWP lead convenor Leonor Magtolis Briones.“Through the Institute, SWP and SUCs will educate the general public, civil society organizations (CSOs) and interested local government officials on national and local public finance working under the framework of citizens’ participation,” she added.