Making the SDGs smarter
Over the next 15 years, the Sustainable Development Goals will influence more than USD 2.5 trillion of money in development aid and trillions more meant to help reduce poverty, hunger and disease, and improve education and the environment. Bangladesh, along with all other nations, now has to decide where to spend scarce resources to do the most good. And clearly not all of the many, many UN targets are equally good, smart or effective.
Since its inception, the UN has had a lot of well-meaning targets, goals and declarations that have made very little impact. At the turn of this century, something remarkable happened when the UN hosted the Millennium Summit, where the largest gathering of world leaders in history agreed to a number of very specific promises, which ended up as the Millennium Development Goals, or the MDGs.