Partnerships for the Goals

This report sets out the framework for the United Nations’ urgent socio-economic support to countries and societies in the face of COVID-19 (coronavirus), putting in practice the UN Secretary-General’s Shared Responsibility, Global Solidarity report on the same subject. It is one of three critical components of the UN’s efforts to save lives, protect people, and rebuild better, alongside the health response, led by the World Health Organization (WHO), and the humanitarian response, as detailed in the UN-led COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan. The e-book for this policy brief has been converted into an accessible format for the visually impaired and people with print reading disabilities. It is fully compatible with leading screen-reader technologies such as JAWS and NVDA.

Older persons and those with underlying medical conditions are at a higher risk of serious illness and death from COVID-19 (coronavirus). Multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination experienced by older persons are exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic and aggravate their vulnerabilities. Triage protocols and policies that ensure medical decisions should be based on clinical assessment, medical need, ethical criteria and on the best available scientific evidence.

Covid-19 (coronavirus) threatens to have devastating consequences in least developed countries (LDCs). Health systems may be unable to cope with a precipitous increase in infections, and these countries lack the resources to cope with the socioeconomic consequences of lockdowns around the world. Unless bold policy actions are taken by the international community, achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the 2030 deadline will likely slip out of reach.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17 recognizes the importance of multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) as part of the means of implementation to achieve the 2030 Agenda. MSPs can be powerful mechanisms to achieve the SDGs, as they can bring to bear a range of different levers from diverse societal sectors, including human and financial resources, technologies, and knowledge. More recently, multi-stakeholder collaboration has proven to be critical to tackle the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and will be essential in the recovery efforts to ‘build back better’ towards more sustainable, resilient and inclusive societies. To support effective partnership building, an enabling partnership ecosystem is required at all levels, including policies and standards that support multi-stakeholder inclusion and collaboration, ensuring that all relevant stakeholders have the necessary knowledge and capacities for partnership creation, and fostering inclusive partnership platforms. Partnership platforms can be particularly effective catalyzers of new and transformative partnerships at all levels as they can serve to mobilize key sectors and stakeholders around joint action and provide coherence and coordination, including alignment of investments for SDG implementation.

How has the focus of the UN General Assembly changed over time and how well is the global agenda expressed in these documents? This paper presents a proof-of-concept classifier to examine the evolution of the global agenda expressed and observed in words of the UN General Assembly resolutions. Using natural language processing to identify four categories of resolutions — Sustainable Development, Justice and Law, Human Rights, and Peace and Security — the analysis of 3,765 UN GA resolutions from 2007 to 2019 reveals the changing areas of focus of the Member States and, as a result, of the UN Secretariat. Sustainable Development is slowly gaining importance in the language in UN resolutions.

Follow-up and review systems and processes promote transparency and accountability by providing information on the results of programmes to implement the SDGs. They also contribute to enhancing SDG implementation by informing policymaking and facilitating learning. Accountability institutions such as legislatures and supreme audit institutions are playing an increasing role regarding SDG assessment and oversight. However, countries have not yet systematically established synergies between SDG follow-up and review and existing accountability institutions. Strengthening such integration can contribute to more holistic SDG monitoring efforts and strengthen accountability for progress on the SDGs. This seems particularly relevant in the context of COVID-19, as countries must urgently address the significant and differentiated impacts of the pandemic on SDG implementation.

The 2030 Agenda and accompanying Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are vital in guiding national and global policy. However, many of the SDG indicators used to measure progress toward those goals suffer from long publication lags. Nowcasting has the potential to address this problem and generate more timely estimates of those indicators. This paper provides resources for achieving that potential by: Carrying out a comprehensive nowcasting feasibility survey of all SDG indicators to assess their potential to be nowcast. Performing a case study of indicator 9.4.1 to illustrate and shed light on the process of performing a nowcasting exercise. There exist 231 SDG indicators, but due to only examining Tier 1 indicators and the fact that many indicators have multiple sub-indicators, 362 indicators and sub-indicators were eventually surveyed. Of those 362, 150 were found highly likely to be suitable candidates for nowcasting, 87 were found to be likely, and 125 were found to be unsuitable.