Jamaican Economy Panel endorses continued relevance of the Sustainable Development Goals

This installment of the JEP's discussion comes on the occasion of the Sustainable Development Report 2021 by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

The Sustainable Development Report finds that in 2021, the best-performing country (Finland) is only 86% of the way towards achieving all the SDGs. At the other end of the spectrum, the Central African Republic is only 38% of the way there. A first-time observation in the report’s history is the decline in average global SDG achievement in 2020, relative to 2019, due to the COVID-19 impact; this finding is noteworthy since much of the relevant data is published with a lag and does not yet fully capture the COVID-19 effect.

The JEP panelists fully endorse the importance of the 2030 Agenda associated with the SDGs, even if they warn that it may not be possible to achieve the entire set of goals before 2030, especially considering the impact of the pandemic. Nevertheless, the panelists see the achievement of the 2030 Agenda as a worthwhile objective.

While the SDGs are strongly interrelated and tend to reinforce each other, the panelists believe that countries should give the People-centered SDGs the highest priority in the current situation. Progress on SDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, which focus on poverty, hunger, health, education, gender equality and sanitation, is likely to be among the most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, thus increasing their current visibility and relevance.

Finally, the panelists acknowledge significant challenges to achieving the 2030 Agenda, primarily in the amount of fiscal space available to many countries and the impact of COVID-19. However, it is crucial to note that the pandemic’s impact makes equitable socio-economic development more important than ever.

The full results of this month’s discussion are available HERE.