European Sustainable Development Week Events on SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals

Out of the over 6,500 events that will be taking place all over Europe during the ESDW 2019, 472 events currently address SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals, which seeks to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.

SDG 17 aims to: 

1. Strengthen domestic resource mobilization, including through international support to developing countries, to improve domestic capacity for tax and other revenue collection.
2. Developed countries to implement fully their official development assistance commitments, including the commitment by many developed countries to achieve the target of 0.7 per cent of ODA/GNI to developing countries and 0.15 to 0.20 per cent of ODA/GNI to least developed countries; ODA providers are encouraged to consider setting a target to provide at least 0.20 per cent of ODA/GNI to least developed countries.
3. Mobilize additional financial resources for developing countries from multiple sources.
4. Assist developing countries in attaining long-term debt sustainability through coordinated policies aimed at fostering debt financing, debt relief and debt restructuring, as appropriate, and address the external debt of highly indebted poor countries to reduce debt distress.
5. Adopt and implement investment promotion regimes for least developed countries.
6. Enhance North-South, South-South and triangular regional and international cooperation on and access to science, technology and innovation and enhance knowledge sharing on mutually agreed terms, including through improved coordination among existing mechanisms, in particular at the United Nations level, and through a global technology facilitation mechanism.
7. Promote the development, transfer, dissemination and diffusion of environmentally sound technologies to developing countries on favourable terms, including on concessional and preferential terms, as mutually agreed.
8. Fully operationalize the technology bank and science, technology and innovation capacity-building mechanism for least developed countries by 2017 and enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology.
9. Enhance international support for implementing effective and targeted capacity-building in developing countries to support national plans to implement all the sustainable development goals, including through North-South, South-South and triangular cooperation.
10. Promote a universal, rules-based, open, non-discriminatory and equitable multilateral trading system under the World Trade Organization, including through the conclusion of negotiations under its Doha Development Agenda.
11. Significantly increase the exports of developing countries, in particular with a view to doubling the least developed countries’ share of global exports by 2020.
12. Realize timely implementation of duty-free and quota-free market access on a lasting basis for all least developed countries, consistent with World Trade Organization decisions, including by ensuring that preferential rules of origin applicable to imports from least developed countries are transparent and simple, and contribute to facilitating market access.
13. Enhance global macroeconomic stability, including through policy coordination and policy coherence.
14. Enhance policy coherence for sustainable development.
15. Respect each country’s policy space and leadership to establish and implement policies for poverty eradication and sustainable development.
16. Enhance the global partnership for sustainable development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and financial resources, to support the achievement of the sustainable development goals in all countries, in particular developing countries.
17. Encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships.
18. By 2020, enhance capacity-building support to developing countries, including for least developed countries and small island developing States, to increase significantly the availability of high-quality, timely and reliable data disaggregated by income, gender, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographic location and other characteristics relevant in national contexts.
19. By 2030, build on existing initiatives to develop measurements of progress on sustainable development that complement gross domestic product, and support statistical capacity-building in developing countries.

Progress being made towards achieving SDG 17

• Goal 17 seeks to strengthen global partnerships to support and achieve the ambitious targets of the 2030 Agenda, bringing together national governments, the international community, civil society, the private sector and other actors. Despite advances in certain areas, more needs to be done to accelerate progress. All stakeholders will have to refocus and intensify their efforts on areas where progress has been slow.
  • In 2017, net ODA totalled $146.6 billion in 2017, a decrease of 0.6 per cent from 2016 in real terms. ODA as a share of donors’ gross national income (GNI) remained low, at 0.31 per cent.
  • In 2016, remittances to low- and lower-middle-income countries were more than three times the amount of ODA they received.
  • In LDCs, debt service as a proportion of exports of goods and services increased for five consecutive years—from a low of 3.5 per cent in 2011 to 8.6 per cent in 2016.
  • In 2016, high-speed fixed-broadband reached 6 per cent of the population in developing countries, compared to 24 per cent in developed countries.
  • Total ODA for capacity-building and national planning amounted to $20.4 billion in 2016, representing 18 per cent of total aid allocable by sector, a proportion that has been stable since 2010.
  • The developing regions’ share of world merchandise exports declined for two consecutive years: from 45.4 per cent in 2014 to 44.2 per cent in 2016, a sharp contrast to an average annual 1.2 percentage point increase between 2001 and 2012. For LDCs, the share of world merchandise exports decreased from 1.1 per cent to 0.9 per cent between 2013 and 2016, compared to the rise from 0.6 per cent to 1.1 per cent between 2000 and 2013.
  • In 2017, 102 countries or areas were implementing national statistical plans. Sub-Saharan Africa remained in the lead, with 31 countries implementing such plans; however, only three of them were fully funded.
  • In 2015, developing countries received $541 million in financial support from multilateral and bilateral donors for all areas of statistics. This amount represented only 0.3 per cent of total ODA, short of what is needed to ensure that countries in developing regions are better equipped to implement and monitor their development agendas.
  • During the decade from 2008 to 2017, 89 per cent of countries or areas conducted at least one population and housing census.

To find out  more about the ESDW Events dealing with SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals, please visit the Activities section on the ESDW website.