‘Be leaders and inspire,’ UN deputy chief urges as 2030 deadline approaches — Global Issues

The Special event entitled Delivering on the SDG Promise: Pathways for Acceleration takes place on the sidelines of the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) has now started and aims to get the SDGs back on track and leave no country behind.

It will boost the so-called “High Impact Initiatives” championed across the UN development system and key investment strategies, while also putting countries in the spotlight.

Speaking exclusively to UN News UN Deputy Chief of Staff Mayra Lopes highlighted six key transition areas for accelerating the SDGs that are essential for success: food systems, energy access and affordability; digital connectivity, education, jobs and social protection; and climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

The interview has been edited for clarity and shortening.

UN News: The global community is meeting this week at the High-Level Political Forum. We have six years to go until the 2030 deadline for the SDGs. What is your message to leaders?

Amina Mohammed: Be leaders. Be leaders for people and what they need and the promises made in the SDG agenda. Be leaders for the planet and the things we need to do for a 1.5 degree world.

Be leaders and inspire, accountable to the UN Charter. And come away from the UN knowing that this is the place where you will hear those voices and their hopes and aspirations. And that should give you the energy and the inspiration to go back and do the right thing.

UN News: The United Nations system is coalescing around these six key transitions or pathways to acceleration. Can you tell us more about these areas and why it is so important to leave no one behind?

Amina Mohammed: We had very clear marching orders from member states when they really got the wake-up call of how far off track we were with the SDGs last year. 15 percent, 17 percent in some places. Not enough. And for that we had to think if this is an acceleration to 2030, what is it that would provide resources to support investments that would deliver on the SDGs? All 17. And you don’t go out and talk about 17 ideas.

These are signposts to get us where we need to be. So we kind of clarified what those investments could be. Where the private sector would come, the public sector is already there, where we could scale, where the UN could reposition itself to help countries do that. And so those transitions made sense because we were talking about food systems.

Why were we talking about food systems? We had felt the impact of COVID and what that did to disrupt the world. We felt the impact of Ukraine on food systems directly. We responded of course with the Black Sea Grain Initiative and that saved many lives.

But I think it was clear that we could do more. And depending on others wasn’t always the best way to go. That’s also a system that’s holding us back from a 1.5 degree world.

The second was the energy transition. How do we make sure that everyone has access to energy? Access, whether it’s for cooking or for small-scale industries like education and healthcare, and really thinking off-grid. Not everything has to be on the grid. We can find mini-grids that can power entire communities, and especially if we wanted to connect that to food systems.

The third was connectivity. Of course, the new technologies are here now. How do we connect people? And in this particular case, for what? Well, for financial services for women, for example. We want to make sure that you can go out into the world without leaving your village, through e-commerce. That needs to be driven, to be connected.

And then we also thought that, well, education is not good. So, that was a fourth transition. It is not the transformation of education that we want to achieve overnight. That is the end game of what you want to put into it. But what is the first thing that maybe needs attention? Young people are unemployed. They have not had the education that they should have.

You want to connect them to markets. And to do that, if you’re transforming skills in food systems, how do you do that with technology and do it better and make it fairer? Closing the gaps that exist today. Creating jobs that people feel like they’re losing or have lost.

And then, to put this into context, I think about two important things: the resilience of people that needs to be supported by, I would say, a social protection floor that takes away from the GDP of the country. Then you have some resilience, and you can make sure that when you get these big hits, like COVID-19that people don’t go astray.

And last but not least, creating a favourable climate becomes more difficult if we do not pay attention to what we call the triple crisis: climate, biodiversity and pollution.

UN News: I want to talk about the digital innovation part. I wanted to know if you are hopeful and how you think we can leverage this new technology?

Amina Mohammed: I met a gentleman in Barbados recently. He was the one who designed the search engine, the very first one we had, called Archie. I said to him, so tell me, what do you think about this new age of technology that you’re obviously very familiar with? And he said, “It’s very exciting, it’s very scary, and we’re not ready for it yet.” And I thought, well, that probably sums up the reality.

The Secretary-General has submitted his offer to the Top of the future how you put the guardrails around the potentials. There is a dark side to it, but there are so many opportunities, and I think that structure will help us be safer.

It will help us move forward in a connected world and we need to do things about governance, about the way technology is used, whether it’s algorithms that are designed with a bias against women.

But I think what’s more important is when I said to him, “Is this the same as going from the horse and buggy to the internal combustion engine when we industrialized?” And he said, “No, it’s much more than that – because you’re talking about changing societies and the way we do things.” We’re never going to be the same, because we’re going to be so much more connected.

UN News: We talk a lot about SDG acceleration, but we have a very challenging landscape now with wars and global tensions. How do you think we can still push for SDG acceleration in this scenario?

Amina Mohammed: Well, back to your first question. We need leadership. We need leadership at all levels. That’s not just the president of a country, but in all constituencies, the business community, civil society, youth.

That will be a big part of what should give us hope. Revitalizing the United Nations (as) a stronger city hall for a global village, so that voices here are not just heard, but they are heeded.

We don’t all have the same muscles in the workplace, but we do have a voice and we can make it heard. Furthermore, we have to be aware every day that the representation of our population is so diverse and that the needs are so complex.

Maybe what matters more to me is how we find the resources for the development agenda, for peace, for security. But not security in the way we pay for war; but security in the way we invest in prevention – which is development.

We are in a system that was designed for a recovery from World War II in 1945. “May we never again experience the scourge of war.” But we have. And the same principles that we applied then, that people need access to resources to rebuild their lives, are exactly the same principles that we need today to say that you need long-term financing for your development, wherever you are in the world.

I hope that the acceleration will happen because we all realize that a global warming of 1.5 degrees is an existential threat, and people will no longer remain on the sidelines.

And how they respond depends on how much injustice they think their local leadership, national leadership, and international leadership is doing to them. So this is a very interconnected world. Young people are full of energy. They are fearful because they see no future.

If I go back to the creation of many terrorists, they are not born. It is an exclusionary environment, an environment of injustice, an environment without hope.

And that is why young people are an easy target for those who want to disrupt things in an unfortunate way.

So I have hope that we have never been better equipped in a world with the resources to do the right thing. We have a great framework and pathway to get there through the SDGs. And I think we just have to get up and race this last mile and then deliver on the promise of the SDGs.