The Role of African Parliaments in Achieving the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals: Progress and Prospects

Background

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) meant to be achieved by 2015. The goals were initially agreed upon by various heads of state in the year 2000, allowing 15 years for their implementation. The MDGs marked a first-ever attempt to commit to a common framework of global development, even though the goals were not supported by a budget or parcelling out of clear responsibilities (McArther, 2013, p. 153). In the early years, after agreement on the goals, various views on their achievement began to be fielded. A hindrance to achievement would be possible wars, mostly in developing countries, triggered by a global arms trade of $900 billion, an amount much higher than $195 billion needed for development assistance in 2015 (Fenwick et al., 2005, p. 1030). Sceptics had reservations about the goals. Some argue that they are Western subterfuge that continues to reassert global core-periphery relations between developed and developing countries (Gabay, 2012). Furthermore, as a critique, they were accused of being mute on inequality and socio-economic exclusions (Saith, 2006) and not attuned to national contexts (Fehling et al., 2013). Looking at the instance of Africa, Easterly (2009) asserts that there was a discourse circulating that made Africa's progress in achieving the MDGs seem worse, indicating an inherent bias against the continent. The issue of especially sub-Saharan Africa considered underachieving needed to consider how Africa began from a lower level of human development and therefore a lower starting point than developed countries (Vandemoortele, 2011).

Whatever the misgivings, bouts of enthusiasm, or tentative optimism that had emerged in literature around the MDGs, they needed to be assessed. As the deadline dawned, the MDGs were considered to have produced mixed results in their achievements. Observers noted partial achievement in reduction of hunger, poverty, maternal health, and child mortality, whilst environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development lagged (Lomazzi et al., 2014). In the aftermath of 2015, heads of state met to contemplate an agenda for the post-2015 era, which entailed formulating an elaborate list of what would be termed Sustainable Development Goals (Beisheim, 2015). The discussion pursued more ambitious goals, which would be almost double the MDGs. There were 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) agreed upon, as opposed to the eight-millennium development goals that were the basis for consensus in the year 2000 agreement lasting until 2015.

The 17 SDGs and the MDGs, in their focus areas, are covered in the table below: