5 pitfalls Nigeria must avoid in implementing SDGs
This weekend at the United Nations headquarters in New York, the world is set to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as another 15-year successor agenda to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
World leaders, including President Muhammadu Buhari, are already in New York for the epoch event, where Nigeria is expected to unveil her end-point report on its implementation of the MDGs in the last 15 years.
While Nigeria made appreciable progress in the implementation of the development agenda, the endpoint report, several other reports conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and experts have revealed that Nigeria would have made better progress if some pitfalls were avoided.
Daily Trust has identified five pitfalls, which Nigeria must avoid in the implementation of the new development agenda for improved results.
Nigeria delayed the implementation of the MDGs by six years, a development that limited the gains of the agenda.
Chief Whip of the House of Representatives, who is also a former Chairman, House Committee on MDGs, Hon Alhassan Ado Doguwa, had recently advised the federal government to start the implementation of the SDGs from January 1, 2015, which is the formal date for the commencement of the new agenda.
Doguwa told a forum in Abuja that the delay in the implementation of the MDGs was largely behind the reason some of the goals were not met. Owing to the delay, Nigeria struggled to achieve within nine years what other countries achieved in 15 years. This, Doguwa warned, must not be the case with the SDGs.
Analysis of the latest MDGs performance-tracking survey report released by the NBS indicated that Nigeria has fully achieved the Goal Three, which was hinged on “promoting gender equality and empowering women.”
The report revealed that gender disparity in primary and secondary education has been eliminated as “for every male, there is a female being enrolled into schools.”
The report indicated that, “in primary schools, the Gender Parity Index in 2012 was 1.00 per cent, which increased in 2014 to 1.02 per cent. In secondary schools, the GPI ratio was 1.02 per cent in 2012 and decreased by barely 1 per cent in 2014 to 1.01 per cent.”
For Goal One, the data indicated that in 2014, the percentage of underweight prevalence was 25.50 per cent, just below the 27.40 per cent recorded in 2012, even as data for Goal Six showed that the acceptance attitude towards people living with the HIV dropped to 11.00 per cent from the previous year, implying that stigmatisation of people living with AIDS is still an issue to be tackled.
For Goal Two, net attendance rate for primary schools declined to 68.70 per cent in 2014 from 2012’s 71 per cent, even as primary six completion rate dropped to 74 per cent as against 89.60 per cent recorded in 2012.
For Goal Seven, people with access to and use of improved sanitation facilities stood at 33.30 per cent, a decline by 1.2 per cent as compared to 2012.
It is worth noting that considerable gains have been achieved in Goal Four, which focused on reduction in child mortality, with infant mortality rate put at 58 (per 1000 live births) in 2014, as against 61 (per 1000 live births) recorded in 2012.
Recently, the nation’s statistical authority admitted that Nigeria was not statistically ready for the MDGs.
Though experts had warned of the difficulty in ascertaining if Nigeria was making progress in MDGs due to multiplicity of contradicting statistics, the Statistician-General of the Federation, Dr Yemi Kale, recently admitted that there is multiplicity of agencies tracking the implementation process, thereby creating confusion.
“It was difficult to tell if Nigeria met the targets or not,” he said, while referring to the confusion caused by multiplicity of bodies tracking implementation of the goals.
He admitted that in previous reports, the Bureau used wrong indicators to track the achievements of some of the goals.
Kale said both the baseline and some indicators used in tracking the development goals were wrong, a development which must be avoided in the SDGs.
As if starting the implementation six years later was not enough damage, monitoring of the achievements was also delayed by four years.
Kale told a stakeholders’ workshop on data mapping for SDGs held in Abuja that the country started monitoring four years after the MDGs started.
In a 2004 report of an assessment carried out by the World Bank on Nigeria’s financing needs and options for achieving the MDGs entitled, “Nigeria’s Opportunity of a Generation: Meeting the MDGs and Reducing Indebtedness,” the bank held that Nigeria could hardly achieve the MDGs on the grounds of what the bank called her highindebtedness.
Funding the MDGs remained a huge challenge until Nigeria won a Paris Club approval for a debt relief in November 2005, which, by March 2006, should eliminate $30 billion worth of the country’s total $37 billion external debts.
With the debt relief, the federal government started channelling the annual debt service payments that should have gone to the external creditors to the Universal Basic Education Programme, free feeding for primary school children, primary health care, rural infrastructure, electrification, water supply and other key poverty reducing sectors captured in the MDGs.
Even at that, funding has remained a big challenge, as recently admitted by the Head of the Conditional Grants Scheme in the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on