Speeding up the Sustainable Development Goals: Partnerships
Part 4
Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is badly lagging. Only 12 per cent of the 169 SDG targets is on track, progress on 50 per cent of the targets is weak and insufficient, and progress has either stalled or reversed on more than 30 per cent of the goals.
The health-related Sustainable Development Goals are also lagging. For example, the goal on Universal Health Coverage is going at only a fraction of the pace needed to reach its 2030 target.
So the key question for countries, who bear the responsibility for reaching the SDGs, is: How do we speed up? The key question for multilateral agencies like WHO: how do we help countries to speed up?
These questions are highly relevant as we reach the mid-point of the SDGs, and the UN reviews mid-point progress at the SDG Summit in September 2023.
I can think of three ways so speed up the SDGs: delivery for impact, innovation, and partnerships. Earlier articles in this series have focused on the first two and this article focuses on the third of these.
A way to think about partnerships is in these categories: multilateral, civil society and private sector. This post will look at newer developments in health in these three approaches, as pathfinders to speed the SDGs. This key point is worth underlining: effective partnerships are not for their own sake but ultimately for SDG impact.
And because SDGs are only as good as the people solving them, I have also focused earlier posts on career advice for young (and not so young) people: find a problem and solve it, get the right mentors working for you, and leverage your platform.
Multilateral partnerships
In the case of multilateral agencies, partnerships help accelerate SDGs through improving the effectiveness and efficiency of delivery by promoting best practices and reducing duplication.
WHO participates in many multilateral partnerships (I use this term broadly to refer to inter-governmental and multi-stakeholder partnerships with a focus on agencies). Examples include the Quadripartite Collaboration for One Health and UHC 2030. However, one partnership aimed at improving fundamentally how multilateral agencies collaborate to serve country priorities is the SDG 3 Global Action Plan (SDG 3 GAP). Launched in 2019, SDG 3 GAP is a partnership among 13 multilateral agencies. Its recently published 2023 progress report takes an honest look at what has worked and what has not worked since SDG3 GAP was launched.
Based on lessons learned, the report makes recommendations to further enhance collaboration in the multilateral system to help countries accelerate progress on the health-related SDG targets as input for the preparation of the next United Nations General Assembly SDG Summit and the High-level Meeting on UHC in September 2023:
continue SDG3 GAP improvement cycle for health;
maintain GAP as an platform for collaboration;
continue to foster collaboration at country level on PHC and thematic topics like zero dose communities and climate resilient health systems;
jointly apply new approaches at country level such as delivery for impact
re-engage civil society; and
strengthen incentives for collaboration through political leadership, governance direction and funding for collaboration.
At the heart of SDG 3 GAP is the improvement cycle, shown below:
Most important is how partnerships support SDG progress at the country level. For example, in Pakistan, multilateral agencies worked together to support the country in primary health care. In Malawi, agencies collaborated on data. In Somalia, they worked together on solar powered oxygen. You can read case studies of 21 countries here.
Civil Society Partnerships
In the case of civil society, partnerships help accelerate SDGs through a focus on human rights and gender equality, accountability, community engagement (including faith communities), engagement through sports and health, and meaningful youth engagement.
The key is to channel engagement into SDG progress. This was very much the spirit of a report published early in Dr Tedros tenure, “Together for the Triple Billion.”
More recently, a number of mechanisms for WHO to work more closely with civil society have been created. One of these is the WHO Civil Society Commission, which aims to strengthen dialogue, foster collaboration and provide recommendations to support WHO's Secretariat in its engagement with civil society at global, regional, and national levels to achieve health for all and the objectives of the WHO General Programme of Work as well as to accelerate attainment of health-related SDGs.
Another is the WHO Youth Council, which aims to amplify the voices and experiences of young people, and leverage their expertise, energy and ideas to promote public health.
Private Sector Partnerships
In the case of the private sector, partnerships help accelerate SDGs through focusing on research and development, data and digital health, providing trustworthy information through social media, improving the health impact of the private sector’s core activities, developing WHO’s systems catalyst role in innovative finance, and expanding environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment criteria to fully include health (ESGH).
WHO’s interactions with the private sector can be categorized into three approaches (alongside tax, regulation and awareness-raising). First is recusal from an industry. This is the approach to the Tobacco industry. WHO will have nothing to do with them. Since the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control was passed in 2003, smoking rates have fallen by 1/3.
Second is engagement with an industry. An example of this is elimination of industrial transfats. Since WHO first called for the global elimination of industrially produced trans fat in 2018 – with an elimination target set for 2023 – population coverage of best-practice policies has increased almost six-fold. Forty-three countries have now implemented best-practice policies for tackling trans fat in food, with 2.8 billion people protected globally. Despite substantial progress, however, this still leaves 5 billion worldwide at risk from trans fat’s devastating health impacts with the global goal for its total elimination in 2023 remaining unattainable at this time.
A third approach, more recent and less well known, is shareholder activism. During the pandemic, vaccine inequity might have cost more than one million lives. Based on the model of Engine Number 1 in climate, Oxfam sponsored shareholder resolutions at the 2022 Annual General Meetings of several pharmaceutical companies. The resolution at the Moderna AGM urged the company to study the feasibility of transferring vaccine technology and know-how to urgently ramp up production and improve sustainable access around the world. Dr. Tedros presented the resolution at the Moderna Annual General Meeting, the first time to my knowledge a senior UN Official made a direct appeal to a company’s shareholders. The resolution gained 24% of the vote, a “good showing” for a first time shareholder proposal, and it was recently reintroduced. Imagine if every year this mechanism was used by UN agenices in partnership with civil society to bring attention and action to the greatest threats to health.
Meet WHO Colleagues
Throughout this series I have been writing about WHO colleagues at the forefront of ways to speed up the SDGs. WHO’s Director of Partnerships, my friend and colleague Gaudenz Silberschmidt, leads this area with great energy and thoughtfulness. Gaudenz was responsible not only for the negotiation of WHO’s Framework for Engagement of Non-State Actors (which governs WHO’s interactions) but also with a recent, rapid, and fulsome expansion of the partnerships themselves.
One of the joys of my time at WHO has been working with two WHO colleagues in the Secretariat of SDG 3 GAP, Hendrik Schmitz Guinote and Isadora Quick. I couldn’t have asked for better colleagues.
Conclusion
This is the final post (for now) in this series on speeding up the SDGs. An overview showed that at the midpoint of the SDG period the health related SDGs were lagging and acceleration is needed. Three subsequent posts explored key ways to speed up SDGs: delivery for impact, innovation, and (in this post) partnerships. These approaches go beyond specific thematic approaches to improve systems that could be used to promote any content area. WHO has concrete pilots in each that if scaled could accelerate SDGs, and these experiences in health could inform the SDGs as a whole. Complementing initiatives that focus on advocacy and finance, these approaches to speeding up SDGs focus on execution and implementation. I hope that as we approach the SDG Summit in September 2023, we make plans to scale these approaches across the SDGs. That would truly be multilateralism with results!