UNDP and the World Bank released its new report ‘Transitioning from the MDGs to the SDGs’ on 10 November 2016, coinciding with the UN System Chief Executives Board for Coordination's (CEB) Second Regular Session of 2016.

The session brings together United Nations System Principals to enhance UN system-wide coherence and coordination on a broad range of issues of global concern. The launch of the report is timely as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has set the vision for the next 14 years of global action.

“The 2030 Agenda is recognized as a transformative, universal and integrated agenda. Implementation should not create 17 new silos around the Sustainable Development Goals,” recommends the new report.

The report pulls together the main lessons from the Millennium Development Goals Reviews by the UN System and World Bank Group for their engagement at the country level. These reviews took place at meetings of the UN CEB from 2013 to 2015.

According to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the CEB Reviews were “unprecedented – a truly integrated system-wide endeavour, championed jointly by World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim and United Nations Development Programme Administrator Helen Clark”.

The report concludes, “it is time to more systematically consider the ‘how’ of the integration at the country level and draw on the comparative advantages of the UN system’s diverse areas of expertise, how to work collaboratively and deliver together, and how to work on the continuum from the normative to the operational as a comprehensive and coherent UN effort.”

UNDP Administrator Helen Clark stated, “To leave no one behind, strong engagement with local communities and civil society is required. This should include investments in the empowerment of women and girls, sustainable energy for all, and the sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity.” She further added, “Achieving sustainable development is helped by having humanitarian and development actors working closely together.”

“The World Bank Group and the United Nations have a shared vision of a world free of extreme poverty by 2030,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim. “To meet our ambitious goals, World Bank Group and UN staff must collaborate effectively with our country partners, use our comparative advantages, and remove bottlenecks that impede delivery. This report has shown that, together, we can achieve better results for people and the planet.”

“The MDG acceleration exercise not only delivered results on the MDG targets, it also provided lessons that are directly applicable to our work on the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Bank Group’s own twin goals to end poverty and boost shared prosperity. We know that to achieve those ambitious and interrelated targets at scale, World Bank Group and UN staff have to be flexible, share knowledge, and focus on measurable results,” stated Mahmoud Mohieldin, World Bank Group Senior Vice President for the 2030 Development Agenda, United Nations Relations, and Partnerships.

“The CEB reviews were the highest level of analysis the United Nation’s leadership devoted to advocating the need to work across silos, and work across the Millennium Development Goals to tackle off-track MDG targets, with an implicit aim to learn lessons for what was to come: a more integrated sustainable development horizon called the SDGs. There is a shared understanding that investing in solutions within a sector was often not sufficient to meet a particular MDG target,” said Magdy Martínez-Solimán, UN Assistant Secretary General and Director of UNDP’s Bureau for Policy and Programme Support.

Simona Petrova, Acting Secretary of the CEB and Director of the CEB Secretariat, United Nations recalled, “the MDG Reviews showed that significant development gains were possible when the UN system really came together in support of countries. A hallmark of the Reviews was the high level of coordination and cooperation between the UN Country Teams and the World Bank Group offices. To help meet the ambition of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, achieving this degree of collaboration ought to be the goal in all countries from the very beginning of the SDG implementation period.”

The new report draws attention to the three main conclusions that need to be applied to the transition to the 2030 Agenda, such as: a) Support cross-institutional collaboration between the UN and the World Bank; b) Advance better understanding of cross-sectoral work, and the interrelatedness of goals and targets; and c) Promote global and high-level advocacy.

The report discusses 16 countries and the Pacific Island sub-region – an exercise that brought together the UN and the World Bank Group, which systemically identified the country situation, the bottlenecks to attainment of the MDGs, and potential solutions to be implemented. Since many MDGs have been absorbed into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), many of the observations and solutions provided are expected to prove useful to implementation of the SDGs.

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Executive Summary

Lessons and recommendations from the CEB Reviews: A forward-looking perspective from the MDG Era

Many countries mainstreamed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) into their national and sub-national development plans and strategies, and implemented specific measures intended to achieve the associated targets. However, progress was uneven and, in spite of best efforts, many countries missed one or more of the MDG targets.

During the last three years of the MDG period, heightened efforts were made at accelerating progress. Acceleration efforts were expected to shorten the amount of time to completion and offer significant benefits to the implementation phase of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Much has been learned through efforts of the last fifteen years, and there is enough evidence to guide such efforts. This report documents the experience of 16 countries and the Pacific Islands sub-region with acceleration efforts.

One important aspect of the MDGs has been their focus on measuring and monitoring progress. Estimates for the developing world indicate that the targets for extreme poverty reduction (MDG 1.a), access to safe drinking water (MDG 7.c) and improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers (MDG 7.d) were reached ahead of the 2015 deadline. The target on ending gender disparity in primary education was met in 2010. Targets on gender equality in primary and secondary education (MDG 3.a) and the incidence of malaria (MDG 6.c) were met by 2015.

In contrast, progress on the remaining MDG targets lagged, especially for the education and health-related MDGs. The primary school completion rate reached 90 percent by 2012, but progress was off track to meet the target of a universal completion rate by 2015. Progress towards MDGs related to infant, child and maternal mortality (MDGs 4a and 5a), and access to basic sanitation (MDG 7c) were lagging behind by 2015.

The heterogeneity of outcomes at the country level translates into stark differences at the regional level. At one end, the East Asia and Pacific regions are estimated to have met all of the MDGs. At the other end, sub-Saharan Africa is off target on most of the goals. The regions still falling short, in particular South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, started from positions that required the most improvement. They have made significant progress in absolute terms, particularly on the health MDGs, which the world as a whole is struggling to meet. The relative nature by which many of the MDGs are defined tends to mask significant accomplishments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Progress towards the MDGs also varied sharply along two key dimensions: the rural-urban divide, and demographic features. People living in cities saw far more development progress than those in rural areas, reflecting the importance of scale economies in urban centres, and the challenges of providing services in more sparsely populated rural localities. Countries where the demographic transition to low fertility and low mortality is either stalled or delayed have faced major challenges.

Although many of the MDG targets were not met in many countries, significant progress means the world we live in today is fundamentally different from the world when the MDGs were adopted. In 1990, 58 percent of the global population lived in a low-income country. In 2000, this declined to 41 percent, and in 2013, to only 12 percent. People in extreme poverty made up 36 percent of the global population in 1990 (1 out of every 3 people). This share declined to 28 percent by 2000 and 11.5 percent (1 out of 8) in 2015. Nonetheless, 850 million people still live on less than US $1.25 a day.

These developments have led to major changes in the global distribution of income. In 1988, just two years before the benchmark year for the MDG period, the world could be divided into two distinct distributions of income. These distinctions have begun to blur today, as the world becomes more like one continuous group of countries instead of one developing and one developed group. Similar conclusions can be drawn by analysing where global gross domestic product (GDP) is shifting. Keeping constant the initial grouping of countries by income category of 1990, low-income countries at that point produced approximately 5 percent of GDP. That same set of countries produced close to one-fifth of global GDP in 2013. Low-income and middle-income countries together produced close to 40 percent of global GDP in 2013, up from about 20 percent in 1990. Their economic growth rates significantly outperformed those of high-income countries.

The process of articulating the MDGs and building a consensus around core objectives as well as coalitions to achieve them played a positive role in some of these shifts. It also yielded numerous lessons to inform movement on the 2030 Agenda and its SDGs.

The Way Forward

The 2030 Agenda is recognized as a transformative, universal and integrated agenda. Implementation should not create 17 new silos around the SDGs. It is time to more systematically consider the ‘how’ of integration at the country level – how to draw on the comparative advantages of the UN system’s diverse areas of expertise, how to work collaboratively and deliver together, and how to work on the continuum from the normative to the operational as a comprehensive and coherent UN effort.

The UN system will need to embrace strong ownership at the country level. It should continue its collaboration with existing partners, including philanthropic organizations, NGOs and civil society organizations cultivated during the MDG period. It should also expand and actively seek partnerships with the private sector, particularly in the areas of financing, data and implementation of the SDGs.

The CEB reviews showed that significant gains were possible when agencies came together to support an acceleration goal. Country teams improved the alignment and coherence of UN system activities on the ground, bridged sectoral silos while still valuing the specialized expertise of individual agencies, and more effectively advocated with governments and other partners. High-level coordination between UN country teams and World Bank country offices was repeatedly recognized as an accomplishment.

Three main conclusions clearly apply to the transition to the 2030 Agenda:

Support cross-institutional collaboration between the UN system and the World Bank

Recognizing that the SDGs require more integrated responses, the CEB is an adequate forum to promote institutional coherence across the UN system. A few lessons from the CEB MDG acceleration exercise could be considered not just by the UN system, but by many if not all development actors to make interventions more effective:

• Make sure that there is a mechanism in place that identifies recurrent common bottlenecks, especially those related to integrity, governance and the rule of law, that could provide guidance, through country case studies, on how best to integrate cross-cutting issues in attaining the SDGs. These are cross-cutting themes that do not fall neatly under any one institutional mandate, but can prevent the achievement of the SDGs.

• Define incentive mechanisms to foster cross-cutting collaboration. Coordination and alignment of system-wide and partner support could be reinforced through mechanisms such as round tables around cross-cutting issues with the participation of donors, NGOs and civil society, governments and the private sector. These could effectively connect the capacities and different forms of expertise of the UN system – including in non-resident agencies – to assist countries with planning, reporting and monitoring, financing and the overall implementation of the SDGs.

• Establish joint and pooled funding mechanisms, where relevant, to instill a culture of collaboration across the UN system. Such mechanisms can act as vehicles for host country, private sector and individual giving, and potentially help manage risks.

Advance a better understanding of cross-sectoral work and the interrelatedness of goals and targets

The CEB reviews were a forward looking initiative that strongly advocated cross-sectoral and cross-institutional thinking to tackle off-track MDG targets, with an implicit aim of drawing lessons for the SDGs. There is a shared understanding that investing in solutions within a sector was often not sufficient to meet a particular MDG target. The UN system could provide leadership on this issue through various initiatives. The following are a few examples that could encourage more collaboration across UN agencies and development partners:

• Provide knowledge products and monitoring systems that explicitly recognize interlinkages among and between policies, sectors, and horizontal and vertical dimensions of development. A dashboard to monitor the attainment of the SDGs could automatically identify and report on the interrelatedness of goals and their targets. Multisectoral approaches and tools should be continuously developed to work with sectoral ones, and connect stakeholders for policy formulation and implementation, as done under the MAF.

• Discourage UN organizations from reorganizing along individual SDGs, so that a more holistic approach is applied to SDG implementation. The 2030 Agenda should be viewed by the UN system in its entirety, with an appreciation that implementation requires an integrated approach that capitalizes on the diversity and specialized strengths of individual entities.

• Support platforms for effective engagement at country level to assist governments and other stakeholders in better understanding the interrelatedness of goals and targets.

Promote global and high-level advocacy

High-level attention to specific issues encourages action at global and country levels. Recognizing the value of advocating and communicating links among different issues and results achieved by the UN system on MDG acceleration, it will be important to consider the following:

• Advocate for the sequencing of development issues that require action today to accrue results in the medium and long term critical to meeting the SDGs. These may include climate change, investments in early childhood development, and the planning of sustainable and resilient cities, among others.

• Collectively advocate that UN Member States address recurrent common bottlenecks that could prevent the achievement of the SDGs, such as fragility and conflict.

• Advocate interrelated SDG issues rather than single goals. Identify issues of global relevance that merit strategic and political engagement, and have the highest levels of the UN system conduct dedicated advocacy to achieve better results on the ground.

• Mobilize political support among UN Member States for increased national budget allocations on social services, and demonstrate how services can be extended to the hardest-to-reach individuals and social groups.