It's time for a world-wide people movement for global development

As 2025 begins, we are five years off the target year for Agenda 2030. This is the target date for completing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These were agreed to in 2015 by all 193 member nations of the United Nations. They also have within them targets that are measurable and time-bound.

These seventeen SDGs encompass a wide range of issues that, among others, include addressing poverty, ensuring access to education for all, addressing gender equality and the empowerment of women, providing productive employment and decent work for all. A number of the goals address climate change and conservation measures (including creating healthy seas, clean waterways, and sustainable land use). Underpinning all is the important seventeenth goal which aims to strengthen and promote a global partnership for sustainable development.

It seems to me that, quite apart from any worthwhile and important development gains that would come from achieving the goals, the SGDs provide an important resource for peace in an increasingly fractious world. This is because they provide a framework, a platform, and, yes, an agenda for global co-operation among the nations.

Furthermore, were the priorities and programmes contained within the SDGs to become the sustained focus of attention, there would be less time and resources allocated to ramping up tensions through trade wars, military alliances, and superpower rivalry.

There are many distractions and challenges standing in the way. Conflict, corruption, complacency, preoccupation with the challenges of a “cost of living crisis”, unemployment, migration issues, and the list could go on. These, and much else, are ever present; so if we let them prevent us from striving to achieve the SDGs, we simply resign ourselves to continued failed attempts at peace and security.

Every nation has its share of developmental problems and issues to address. So the SDGs are a way of acknowledging that “we are all in this together”. Furthermore, as President Emmanuel Macron recently reminded us, “there is no Planet-B”. We either co-operate to attain greater peace and security, and wellbeing for all: or we may descend into chaos and conflict.

What is the way forward? How may we ensure that the opportunities afforded by the SGDs are not squandered? The answer, I believe, lies in the hands of civil society. Let’s not forget that the Agenda has already been agreed to: it is a matter of ensuring that the world’s nations follow through.

While much has been achieved, and the SDGs have been taken up by institutions within civil society, it seems to me, that their potential is often unrecognised, and that they are easily forgotten and neglected. Here are two ways, I think that we can ensure the SDGs continue to be the focus of attention.

First, NGOs and charitable organisations that have as their core aims the mitigation of harm and wellbeing of humans, advocate strongly for the SDGs. They may wish to identify the particular SDGs that align with their objectives, and champion those particularly. There is, however, important gains to be had by ensuring governments to not lose sight of the global and collective aspect of the SDGs.

Secondly, citizens are educated and mobilised to insist that the SGDs are made a priority by governments. Our wellbeing and welfare are too important simply to be left to the politicians. We have witnessed many large-scale protest movements since the turn of the millennium. Imagine if  half-a-million to a million people in each member state of the United Nations mobilised to demand that the goals within the SDGs be achieved.  Imagine the momentum that would be generated by protests focused on an agenda already globally agreed and in place?