Growth & Jobs | Integrate Sustainable Development Goals into budgets - UNDP representative

Jamaica is being urged to effectively use its state budget to integrate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into national and local budgeting and budget reporting to ensure that all government expenditure is understood and accounted for as contributing to the SDGs.

United Nations (UN) Resident Coordinator and United Nations Development Programme Resident Representative, Bruno Pouezat, made the proposal during the United Nations high-level political forum (HLPF) in New York, United States recently, where Jamaica and a number of other countries presented their voluntary national review (VNR) reports of progress towards the SDGs.

"The objective must be for all resources available nationally to target explicitly the national development priorities," he stated.

Pouezat said these SDG-aligned budgets and budgetary reports should also tie foreign and domestic private-sector investments to the goals, where applicable.

Quoting from a UN Development Coordination Office report, he noted, as an example, that foreign investments amounted to 5.6 per cent of GDP in 2016, and remittances alone amounted to 17 per cent of GDP.

He pointed out that on the other hand, with less than 0.2 per cent of Jamaica's gross domestic product (GDP) sourced from official development assistance (ODA), it cannot be relied on as a reliable indicator of progress towards achievement of the SDGs.

"At less than 0.2 per cent of Jamaica's GDP, ODA represents less than one per cent of the state budget," he noted.

Aligning budgets and budgetary reporting to the SDGs was necessary to consummate a whole-of-government approach to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda, Pouezat concluded.

STILL FACED WITH SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGES

Minister of state in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Pearnel Charles Jnr., in his contribution to the VNR event in New York, reported that 67.2 per cent of the national outcome indicators and targets for Vision 2030 Jamaica have shown improvement over the baseline year, 2007. He said challenges remained:

"As a small island developing state, however, we are still faced with significant challenges, given our economic, environmental and social vulnerabilities, narrow natural resource base and limited institutional capacity. Additionally, we are frequently and adversely impacted by extreme weather events, which severely retard our development prospects."

Charles said Jamaica's designation as an upper-middle-income country presents a challenge for access to certain types of aid and concessionary financing but that through engagement with the Group of Friends for SDGs Financing, Jamaica had been seeking to mobilise institutional capital from the private sector for various priority projects.

"Strategic resource mobilisation is, therefore, required towards the identification of new, non-traditional and innovative financing modalities," he observed.

Jamaica has moved to prioritise transformative actions - Henry

Dr Wayne Henry, director general of the Planning Institute of Jamaica, noted that Jamaica had moved to prioritise transformative actions outlined in a roadmap for implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Jamaica with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

He was making his contribution to the voluntary national review (VNR) during the United Nations high-level political forum (HLPF) in New York, United States recently.

Henry outlined accelerators to include: social protection outreach to those furthest behind; multidisciplinary efforts to tackle the drivers of non-communicable diseases (NCDs); strengthening the effectiveness of the judicial system; violence prevention programmes; building disaster risk resilience; and advancing the development of the blue and green economies.

Integrating climate hazards

Dr Henry said Jamaica was deliberately integrating climate hazards across all dimensions of sustainable development planning because of repeated impacts including dislocation of population, disruption of livelihoods, and damage and losses, which have historically been equivalent to one to two per cent of GDP per annum.

And in reporting on the need for high quality data to guide development priorities in the SDGs, deputy director of the Statistical Institute of Jamaica, Leesha Delatie-Budair, said that while the National Statistics System was able to produce 49 per cent of SDG indicators, "a lot more needs to be done to improve official statistics in Jamaica".

The HLPF is the main United Nations platform on sustainable development and it has a central role in the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development the Sustainable Development Goals at the global level.