‘We need inclusive, integrated policies to improve our lives’

Hajiya Amina Mohammed is the special adviser to the United Nations (UN) secretary-general on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this interview she spoke on how the SDGs would replace the MDGs and improve the lives of Nigerians if implemented. Why are you here with the UN secretary-general? The objective of […]

Hajiya Amina Mohammed is the special adviser to the United Nations (UN) secretary-general on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this interview she spoke on how the SDGs would replace the MDGs and improve the lives of Nigerians if implemented.
Why are you here with the UN secretary-general?
The objective of the trip is to support Nigeria in its transition to a new government that has an agenda for change.  This is also coming at a time when the United Nations itself had agreed to the new sustainable development agenda.
However, there is a difference between ‘agreed and adopted.’ We have a process where member states agree and the heads of state adopt them at the summit. In both cases we have an agreement for financing the goals, and we hope that by December we would have an agreement for climate change.
Going back to history, I think it is important to know where we are coming from so that we know where we are going, what we feel and why it is happening this way, as well as how we intend to get out of it in the next 15 years.
I worked for the government of Nigeria as the senior special assistant on the MDGs from 2005 to 2011. We had the debt relief, and that motivated us to try to achieve the MDGs with a billion dollars a year. We focused our spending on things that were a problem to our people, which include poverty eradication, health, sanitation and others that all affect women and children.
We tried to come to an agreement with state governments, which had this as their constitutional responsibilities. The question is: How do we get them to spend on their people? We worked with members of the National Assembly to get them involved in projects in their constituencies such as health, education and water.
In 2011 I left, and by 2012, the United Nations had a summit to address what we would do when the MDGs programme comes to an end, and how to plan for the next 15 years.
So when we went to Rio in 2012, the idea was to learn from the lessons of the MDGs and acknowledge that as a goal setting framework. We have succeeded and brought people together in different sectors and constituencies to work towards the same objective. At that time the target was about reducing the poverty percentage.  The framework brought people together in an integrated way, but the lessons we learnt and the fact on the ground was that member states would agree that this time, they want a universal agenda, an agenda that they would implement, with everyone being involved.
Climate change has been an area of concern; what is the take of the United Nations on this? What is the way forward?
We saw very clearly that climate change was real, and that if any disaster happened in any part of the world, it could affect others.  We saw that climate change was man-made. We saw that immigrants could cross from developing countries and have impact in developed countries. We also had issues on inequalities like lack of access to basic rights and services. All these are causing conflicts as being experienced in the Niger Delta and the North, where young people feel excluded from the economy.
In Rio, we did two things: we looked at universal integration and how to get member states involved. When the MDGs programme commenced, a few men really sat in a room to design it. They looked at education for all and health for all, which we were not able to achieve. It took a long time before people understood the meaning of the MDGs. We were really troubled about it, but I think we learnt our lessons from it.
In Rio, we decided that the 193 member states of the United Nations would take charge and participate in the process. And it will take us three years to define the SDGs with the set of goals. So when I joined the United Nations, the secretary- general asked me to head the MDGS/SDGs project and coordinate the support that comes with all the agencies and programmes of the member states while he would provide the leadership to help member states. He was to provide leadership to push this agenda forward. We need to have an inclusive process where not just the 193 experts sit to discuss at the table, we need to bring in everybody: the media, parliament, civil society, businessmen to this conversation so that at the end, the set goals are owned by all.
We need to take everyone along, even in the poorest small local government of Nigeria. That is where we have to look to see how we can deliver the SDGs.
Three things happened in the United Nations to make 2015 the year of action. First was that we all agreed as member states, and we fought hard to have the financing agreement before the SDGs. This is because when we did the MDGs we didn’t think about the money we needed to implement it. So, this time we agreed in Addis Ababa in July this year to discuss the agenda which no longer needs billions of naira. It actually needs trillions, but we don’t know where we are going to get trillions of naira from.
We also looked at technologies and infrastructure, and we believe that with this framework we can deliver on the SDGs. We spent three years dealing with the SDGs, and finally, we agreed in July. We have 17 goals and 109 targets. The 17 goals do mostly two things: they apply to everyone (universality), they are set of integrated roles – you can’t apply one without the other. So as a whole, we need this. Countries would have different priorities, but we will discuss them as a whole because they address social, economic and environmental issues together.
But we are not leaving the MDGs behind. We have also talked about the economic side – we must produce good jobs, good infrastructure. It doesn’t matter how many times a president comes in every four years. If there is no infrastructure in this country we are not going to go the way we are supposed to go.
This agenda is a 15-year programme. It’s about bonding on the MDGs to eradicate poverty by 2030. We can at least bend the curve on climate change and make those financing available to do all of this.
 The SDGs will start in September 25 in New York, and we expect that all heads of state will read the speeches of their commitment.
The first people that would be impacted by this are the parliamentarians who would have to see what we are doing and the plans we have to implement. This is going to be a signal for going forward. The last agreement in December is going to be the one on the climate change.