Political Will and Financing as Key Elements to Ensure that the New Development Agenda is More than a Paper Exercise

The new development agenda for the next 15 years, approved two weeks ago by the United Nations, is an ambitious statement of intentions that risks remaining as mere words if "business as usual" continues. This is one of the conclusions reached by more than 50 experts that debated during two days (October 13 and 14) at the Palau Macaya in Barcelona, in an international workshop organized by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), together with Save the Children and the Overseas Development Institute.  

The development agenda for 2030, with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets, is a universal agenda that involves both poor and rich countries and that includes environmental and equity issues that were missing from the last agenda (the Millenium Developmental Goals that end this year). However, the challenge lies in the implementation of the different targets, as well as in the measurement of their progress.

To do so, the leading experts in the seminar entitled "Mind the Gap: Health Inequities and the Sustainable Development Goals" agreed that it is urgent to mobilize the necessary funds and that it is not only a matter of development aid but also of transforming the internal economic and social agenda in each country. In addition, it will need support from the private sector and the civil society, who must play an increasingly important role in demanding the fulfilment of the agenda.

The political will, inextricably linked to the funding, is another key element for the success of the agenda. "To ensure an equitable progress that diminishes the increasingly growing gap between and within countries, we need to take measures that include all the social groups and all the regions in the same country" said Antoni Plasència, director of ISGlobal, during the closing session. The challenge, he explained, will consist in adapting the agenda to each particular context while still allowing analysis and comparison at the global level.

The seminar was supported by the Spanish Agency for Cooperation (AECID) and the "la Caixa" Foundation.

Videos of the event

The event was broadcasted on ISGlobal's Youtube channel canal de Youtube de ISGlobal. These are the videos of both days