We are completing six years since the 193 member countries of the United Nations made the commitment to ‘leave no one behind’ within 15 years with the implementation of an action plan called ‘Transforming the world: the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development’.
What was proposed was to end poverty and inequality between 2015 and 2030 with the collective work of the public and private sectors, to promote shared economic prosperity, social development and environmental protection for all countries, with emphasis in the most lagging and vulnerable.
It was a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.
For this reason, to put the Agenda into practice, 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were defined, also known as global goals, applicable in five dimensions: people, prosperity, planet, collective participation and peace; and measurable with 169 indicators.
In 2019, after completing the first five years, United Nations proposed to start a ‘decade of action’ in 2020, after verifying that, although progress had been made in many places, in general the SDGs were not advancing “at the speed or scale necessary” to achieve the goals of the 2030.
For the UN, these actions implied mobilizing world leaderships, governments and people to define policies in favor of the SDG and guaranteeing public and private budgets, as well as the participation and actions of people and organizations of all orders in society, in order to generate “an unstoppable movement that promotes the necessary transformations.”
“The decade of action that began in 2020 requires accelerating sustainable solutions aimed at the world’s main challenges: poverty, gender equality, climate change, inequality and closing the financial gap,” said Colombia in the Third Voluntary Report of the SDGs but, like the rest of the world, it crashed from the outset with the pandemic generated by covid-19 that forced all countries to fully demand themselves because the paralysis that was generated in many cases reversed the advances and in others paralyzed the processes.
The country applied shock measures that implied providing aid to the most vulnerable families with programs such as solidarity income, VAT compensation, Colombia Mayor, Families and Youth in action.
Today, nine years from 2030, the country has 7 of the 17 SDGs with compliance above 85% and 5 above 70%. How has progress been made and how do you need to apply the accelerator?
For the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), “Colombia is able to meet the goals set,” but it has to face challenges such as poverty, employment and the financial gap to achieve it.
