Lack of commitment on the part of organizations and individuals and the slow pace of citizen engagement on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has spurred a partnership movement between the Millennium Promise Alliance (MPA) the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) Platform on SDGs “to power the rest of the goals”.
The two organizations, have in effect, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), empowering them to work together to accelerate achieving the SDGs or ‘Agenda 2030’.
The MoU will facilitate and coordinate the activities of both parties towards the SDGs in the country. Specifically, the two parties will collaborate to among others:
1. Disseminate the CSO Shadow report on the SDGs,
2. Foster the establishment of the District CSO Platform,
3. Undertake youth activities on the SDGs, in particular, the Rolling ICE on the SDGs,
4. Catalyze joint planning, monitoring and execution of SDGs activities, and
5. Facilitate media activities on the SDGs including media training, media awards on the SDGs.
Goal 17 of the SDGs talks about partnerships. It says that the SDGs can only be realized with a strong commitment to global partnership and cooperation.
So far, too many on-the-ground actors are still hesitant to get behind the SDGs. Even though Ghana has been touted as one of the countries that has taken proactive measures towards the SDGs, industry experts believe that citizen engagement with the ‘Agenda 2030’ is currently too slow and too little to catalyze the magnitude of change that is now urgently needed to avoid the worsening of a series of converging crises that are already upon the people ranging from rapid climate change, famines, mass-migration, fundamentalism, resource wars, biodiversity loss to economic volatility among others.
The Country Director of the MPA, Chief Nat Ebo Nsarko, in signing the MoU at a short ceremony in Accra on Tuesday, May 28, 2019, observed that the International community’s failure to successfully implement previous agendas has damaged citizen’s belief in the achievability of such multilateral agreements, insisting that something needs to change if the SDGs are to more successful than ‘Agenda 21’ or the ‘Millennium Development Goals’.
“We need to start by asking critical questions. Why are people not participating more enthusiastically in the widespread implementation of the SDGs? How can we engage communities everywhere to make the United Nations’ Global Goals their local goals? How can individuals and collectives contribute to achieving ‘Agenda 2030’? We need to turn the Global Goals into actively shared objectives for all humanity if we want to create a more sustainable world that works for all by 2030. The SDGs must have the same significance for the literate as well as for the non-literate. Manifesting the agenda will require active participation of people and communities around the world”, he noted.
The Co-Chair, CSOs Platform on SDGs, George Bimpeh, who initialed the MoU on behalf of the CSOs, on his part welcomed the move and noted that the “MoU will pave the way for us to unleash the potentials that lies in unity”.
He was very confident that Ghana will at the end of the day, be the beneficiary of the partnership aimed at accelerating the progress of the SDGs.
“As a community, we have learnt that we cannot continue to be doing things in solo. If the country wants to make the best out of the SDGs, it will be better and proper to form partnerships towards this drive. So, today marks the beginning of yet another efforts that we can collectively undertake so that not only our country can be known globally as having attained the goals, but our people will feel it in their lives. At the end of the day if the people of Ghana cannot feel it in their lives, it can only remain in books and that is why we welcome any joint effort that will help in accelerating the progress towards the SDGs”, he noted.
He added “For the first time, we seems to be getting it right in terms of having a module that galvanizes CSOs around a common purpose. And we are doing it this way because we have learnt our lessons because divided we fall, united we stand and that going forward, partnerships like this, not the ones we have with the government but the ones we have with our peers with international exposure, and those that have local coverage, so that we bring complimentary competences and skills in leverages what we have as Ghanaian community and that of the global community”.
