Remarks at the First Annual SDGs National Conference

Acknowledgements:

The Right Honourable Prime Minister

Honourable Ministers, with a special mention for the Right Honorable Minister in charge of General Duties and the SDGs,

All Government representatives,

Your Excellencies, Ambassadors and heads of diplomatic missions

All participants,

Protocols observed

On behalf of the United Nations system in Uganda, I am pleased to add my voice of welcome to this first Uganda Annual Conference on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), under the theme; “building effective models to accelerate the SDGs in the Post COVID-19 Era”.

I extend my utmost appreciation to the Office of the Prime Minister and the partnership with the UN System that has led to this stock-taking dialogue.

Right Honourable Prime Minister,

There is no doubt about Uganda’s high-level policy commitment to the 2030 Agenda, which has been demonstrated on many fronts.  The Country has embedded the SDGs in its national development policies and strategies. The third National Development Plan (NDPIII) is clearly aligned to SDGs and so are many of its indicators, and thus, the implementation of NDPIII helps us directly quantify the implementation and achievement of the Global Goals. The NDPIII is also aligned to a number of regional and continental aspirations such as the African Union Agenda 2063, the East African Community (EAC) Vision 2050, the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA), and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), all very important frameworks that complement the 2030 Agenda. In the dynamic modeling work done by the National Planning Authority (NPA) two years ago, it was identified that environment, governance, and industry are key SDG accelerators for Uganda. The exercise also recognized human capital development sectors of health, education, water and sanitation as vital enablers for the attainment of Uganda’s development objectives.  

The UN also commends the Government for regularly conducting and sharing reviews of progress at the global, national and sub-national levels. The fact that this national conference was preceded by regional dialogues on SDGs is testament to Government’s commitment to inclusive dialogue on sustainable development.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Despite these successes on the process & implementation front, we see mixed results as regards the concrete results for the achievement of SDGs. While Uganda is on track on some of the SDG 13 targets on climate action, the rate of progress on other SDG targets is less encouraging. We urgently need acceleration of all SDG targets, which as already mentioned, for the most part overlap nicely with NDPIII goals.

Of course, we have – and continue to be faced by unprecedented development challenges. COVID was hugely damaging and still with us. The war in Ukraine is more recent but already making its effect felt. Both crises are inflicting multiple negative impacts on economic growth, price stability, poverty reduction efforts, employment, national debt levels, and the sustainable use of natural resources.  There has been a deterioration of social challenges that exacerbate the above challenges such as increased violence in homes and communities, teenage pregnancies, and higher levels of crime, and more worryingly, more sophisticated criminal networks especially drug networks.  These challenges are, definitely, mirrored pretty much everywhere else and not unique to Uganda.    

The magnified threats to sustainable development demand that we must do things differently. As we deliberate over these two days, I would like to offer the following ideas and invite your reflection on them:  

1. Coordination: In terms of implementing a development agenda – much of the hardest pieces of work has already been done by the Government – Uganda has security and a strong Government that can focus on its development agenda and harmonization of the various interests in the country.  Because, as most will agree, without security and harmonization of interests, it is impossible to implement a development vision and plan.  There are key planning instruments in place – Vision 2040, NDPIII, the Parish Development Model (PDM)- and implementation is underway. Perhaps more efforts could go towards enhancing mechanisms already in place that would allow for an improved and coordinated whole of Government approach. These have already been conceptualized through the NDPIII Programme Implementation Action Plans (PIAPS) but need to be operationalized.
2. Alongside that, it would also be beneficial to improve the mechanisms that harmonise the coordination between Government and the diverse range of development actors to jointly identify ways of tackling challenges, share knowledge and channel resources in a harmonized manner as we all aim towards the national development aspirations. Among other mechanisms and structures, the UN recognizes the National Partnership Forum (NPF) as potentially an opportunity to promote dialogue and ensure alignment of development interventions with Government priorities. Yet, the NPF has not been convened since 2018 and perhaps the way it happened in the past – as I understand, might not be most suitable for today’s challenges. Its configuration needs to be reviewed to respond to the current development cooperation ecosystem. We believe that creating a regular, Government-led, result-oriented and inclusive platform for dialogue on issues of concern would promote mutual trust and accountability between government and her development partners.
3. Development financing: The ongoing crises have re-echoed the urgent need to re-examine our development financing arrangements to better respond. Whereas we recognize that debt levels in Uganda remain manageable and below those in most countries in Africa, there are moderate risks to debt sustainability. It is commendable that Government of Uganda has articulated a Public Investment Financing Strategy, whose full implementation the Finance Minister pledged during the Budget speech on Tuesday. We acknowledge that this strategy is aligned to the key components of the Integrated National Financing Framework as guided by the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. The UN family is available to cooperate with the Ministry of Finance and its partners to implement this strategy as deemed useful by the Government.
4. Population growth: I have lived in some countries that really have tiny populations – like Comoros – and understand that Population size can be an important catalyst for economic growth. Uganda is blessed in that respect and its population is sizeable enough to yield growth benefits. The only challenge is, in these difficult times, Uganda is producing young people at a rate that is too fast to enable Government social services delivery to be adequately felt by all. For example, the Education Finance Watch (EFW)[1] of UNESCO and World Bank shows that Uganda would require to allocate more than a quarter of its national budget to education in order to meet the lower benchmark of spending 4 percent of GDP on education. These funding pressures may not be tenable given other competing priorities.
5. Jobs: And of course, as a population grows, in addition to looking at ways to accelerate service provision, there is a need to look at jobs and the regulatory and policy ecosystems for the   private sector. These would help us produce more decent jobs, building on the catalytic public investments by Government. For instance, how can the private sector complement PDM and further the Government investments towards more economic opportunities? Besides, more broadly, how can the private sector be further facilitated to support the economy grow in ways that create jobs for our young people?
6. Tracking our progress: Improve the country’s capacity to measure progress on its development goals and specifically the SDGs – which, as earlier noted, are already consistent with the national development goals and plans- should be a priority of the national development agenda. During the 2020 Voluntary National Review report, Uganda reported on only 92 (46 percent) of the 201 SDG indicators that are relevant to Uganda. This calls for additional resources to build the capacity of the National Statistical System to produce and disseminate data and statistics to inform decision making. This should be a collaborative effort between Government, Development Partners, Private Sector, Academia and Civil Society to fully utilize the advancements in the data landscape. In response to these data gaps, the UN in Uganda has committed to collaborate with the Uganda Bureau of Statistics to develop a joint UN programme for data and statistics.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I look forward to the new insights we will all gain from this dialogue. It is my hope that the outcome of this conference, and the related sub-national dialogues will first and foremost inform national policy making and implementation of our development plans, which are most urgent, especially in the face of the many crises we currently face.

And as these are global problems, I hope our insights also enrich others through the upcoming High-Level Political Forum in New York next month, and Uganda’s Voluntary National Review in 2023. And via these same discussions, I hope we will also learn from others how they are tackling their challenges.

Thank you!

[1] https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/507681613998942297-0090022021/original/EFWReport2021219.pdf