Why is it important to link the UN SDGs and the African Agenda 2063?

It is vital for policymakers, practitioners and researchers conducting projects in Africa to find ways of implementing the continent’s own development agenda – the African Agenda 2063 – alongside the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which have been adopted as the global framework for sustainable development.

Published by the Africa Union in 2013, African Agenda 2063 provided a 50-year blueprint to achieve inclusive and sustainable socio-economic development for the continent. Two years later, the UN published its Agenda for 2030, which had at its core the 17 global SDGs. While the two agendas both aim for sustainable development, there has been little consideration to identify commonalities and establish links between the two frameworks. This presents challenges in achieving integrated action that responds to both agendas.

In a paper* published earlier this year we discuss links between the SDGs and the African Agenda 2063 and pathways to address both agendas.

We reviewed almost 33,000 possible connections between the 169 SDG Targets and the 193 Agenda 2063 Targets, and identified connections between 4,434 (14%) of them.

Establishing areas of overlap between the two agendas will inform a discussion around converging and diverging priorities. The findings should help funders, policymakers and practitioners to leverage multiple benefits through a targeted approach to address both agendas effectively.

We found overlaps between targets related to policies for sustainable development, development programmes, and capacity building at multiple governance levels. For example, we found that SDG 16 (Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions) has connections with at least seven goals from the African Agenda 2063 (goals 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17 and 18). Likewise, African Agenda 2063 goal 12 (Capable Institutions & Transformative Leadership in Place) had connections with 8 SDGs (SDGs 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 and 16). Hence strengthening institutions and action towards building capacity could aid in addressing both agendas in these areas.

An important area that would benefit from greater convergence includes infrastructure development and service affordability. Addressing shortages of infrastructure, such as provision of basic services and modernising or upgrading existing infrastructure, requires both improved service delivery and effective and democratic governance and management. To address gaps in infrastructure provision in Africa, showing how the African Agenda 2063 and the SDGs can be addressed simultaneously could be used as a vehicle to leverage more resourcing for infrastructure.

We identified goals with no connections or very few connections. These included SDG 1, 2, 3, 4 and 14 relating to poverty, hunger, wellbeing, education and marine life respectively; and African Agenda 2063 goals 2, 4, 5, 9, 16, 18 and 20 relating to education, job creation, agriculture, banking, African culture, youth and development financing respectively.

The lack of connections can be explained by the focus placed on each goal. For example SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) emphasizes agriculture and food production, whereas the African Agenda 2063 goal relating to food and nutrition (Goal 3, Healthy and Well-Nourished Citizens) focuses on the eradication of diseases. We argue, however, that the lack of connections of these goals does not reduce the importance of these goals for Africa and African progress.

Another notable divergence lies between each agenda’s motivations and origins. The SDGs have been adopted as the international framework for sustainable development, while the African Agenda 2063 arose as a continental set of priorities. The African Agenda 2063 specifically seeks to decolonise development and promote political unity, emancipation and economic anticipation. As such, many of its targets focus on the “locality” of development and production and stopping ‘aid’ as an end goal in development budgets.

In contrast, the SDGs agenda is focused on aid and support to so-called ‘less developed countries (LDC).  The SDGs are often seen to frame problems facing LDC’s rather than global goals that all nations need to adopt. The focus of each agenda can be a point of conflict with the other. Additionally, while the creation of the SDGs (or its predecessor: the Millennium Development Goals, etc.) used stakeholder engagement and workshops for their creation, the agenda left little to no room for bottom-up formulation of needs, participation and consultation.

There is an opportunity for future global agendas to find ways to integrate bottom-up formulation of needs, participation and consultation, in the form of tailoring targets to different continental, national or more local needs.

Our ambition is that the opportunities for convergence that our work identified can be used by organisations with limited resources to prioritise action. This would inform both the project design and monitoring stages. The prioritisation exercise could enable policymakers in Sub-Saharan Africa to take a lead in attracting funding in priority areas to leverage multiple benefits.

Future steps include exploring the application of the overlaps between agendas in a real-life setting. We aim to test this during the application of the ‘Integrated & Inclusive Infrastructure Framework (3iF) for Kenya’, a framework that we co-developed to aid planning and design, implementation and policymaking for infrastructure projects in informal settlements that reduce inequality and promote prosperity. It was co-produced in collaboration with Kounkuey Design Initiative, Architectural Association of Kenya, Akiba Mashinani Trust and Arup East Africa.

*Linking the UN Sustainable Development Goals and African Agenda 2063: Understanding overlaps and gaps between the global goals and continental priorities for Africa’ was authored by Dr Margarita Garfias Royo and Dr Priti Parikh from Engineering for International Development Centre at the UCL Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction. Contributing authors include Dr Loan Diep (The New School, New York) and Mukanga Pascal and Dr Joe Mulligan (Kounkuey Design Initiative), who work closely with slum communities.

Links

• Paper: Linking the UN Sustainable Development Goals and African Agenda 2063: Understanding overlaps and gaps between the global goals and continental priorities for Africa’

• Engineering for International Development Centre

• Africa Agenda 2063

• UN Sustainable Development Goals

Image Credit: Kounkuey Design Initiative