A consultation seminar was held today in Cayo to talk about how Belize can recover its progress with the Sustainable Development Goals - after major ground was lost during COVID.
If you don't know what they are, the Sustainable Development Goals - or SDG's as they are called deal with ending poverty, clean water and sanitization, gender equality, and climate action and 13 others along that theme.
Today's meeting was in preparation for the Global 2023 Sustainable development goals summit where Belize will present an overview of its progress and achievements towards attaining the 17 SDG targets. Jomarie Lanza attended the event today.
In 2017, as a member of the United Nations, Belize became one of the first countries to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The framework entails 17 goals aimed towards ending poverty, ensuring prosperity, protecting our planet, fostering peace, and implementing partnerships, set to be achieved by 2030. Since Belize signed onto the agreement only 12% of the SDG targets have been met; implementing agencies say the Covid-19 Pandemic pushed back their progress by 4 years.
And to recover from that, today a partnership dialogue was held, along with partners from the civil society, academia, and the private sector to discuss best practices that would accelerate Belize's progress towards achieving their 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Raul Salazar, United Nations Resident Coordinator
"The commitment of Belize towards the SDG goals, which is a global agreement in which Belize also took part, is to advance the development aspirations of the people of Belize and the people of the world in general. So this meeting is supporting a reflection. An internal reflection on how we can advance towards those commitments. The commitments are built over the contribution of different partners it is very unlikely that any development effort rests only in the government's but also needs the collaboration from different sectors like the civil society academia the private sector also the important and crucial role of not only the government but also the organizations or the grass roots organizations of the base closer to the communities so this reflection is that how we are going to work together to advance towards those objectives."
"After the group dialogue, stakeholders then went into breakout rooms where they would get a chance to further discuss, analyze and solidify partnerships. We spoke to Ambassador Carlos Fuller who will be joining Belize at the SDG Summit where an overview will be presented to other global partners and members."
Carlos Fuller, Permanent Representative of Belize to the UN
"As you know the UN is saying we are way behind on the implementation of this agenda and in fact I think it's only like 2% accomplished we only have 5 more years to makeup for loss ground so this national consultation here is to bring all the stakeholders together so that they can then give us something concrete to present in New York in September and ofcourse I will be there accompanying him so I wanted to hear for the first time what's occurring here so I can speak with some knowledge with my colleagues in New York."
"At the summit the idea by the secretary general of the United Nations is that countries should present their aspirations. What are they proposing to do to make up for these bridges that have occurred and so we are hoping that out of their consultations Belize can say we have done great work in providing water to the communities. We have done great work reducing our vulnerability to severe weather events. Whenever we have a hurricane we have a good early warning system now we don't lose lives but we lose property so we are making progress for people but we now need to address the issue of property so these are the kind of concrete messages we want to be able to share with the international community to say look we are doing great work but there is a lot more we need to do."
So, with only 6 more years on the clock, will Belize be able to uphold its commitment to the UN and meet all their sustainable development goals?:
Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development
"I think from the global scale the analysis showed that there was a major setback according to the secretary general. I think we are at 12% achievement of the goals and we are already at a midpoint. Covid certainly kept back those two years in terms of development because it not only hindered us achieving some of those goals but even at a national level economic development was staggered."
Reporter:
"How confident are you that you will be able to achieve this before 2030?"
Orlando Habet, Minister of Sustainable Development
"I think in large, at a large level and a large scale there is a lot of confidence if you look at the issues of no poverty they say no poverty zero poverty, zero hunger we might not be able to reach there but atleast I think we can get there closely. And so there are areas that we will certainly achieve close to 100% if not some of them like I said maybe one or two are a little bit difficult to get a 100% no poverty or no hunger altogether.
The 2023 Sustainable Development Goals Summit will take place from September 18-19 during the 78th United Nations General Assembly in New York City. Belize will be represented by The Prime Minister and his delegation.
Email
Print