LAHORE: Stakeholders and experts have called for engaging the civil society to achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs) as it would strengthen the development processes at provincial and national levels.
These views were expressed during an event of Launch of Spotlight report on SDGs held on ‘Engaging Civil Society in Decade of Action to Accelerate SDGs Implementation – Lessons from High Level Political Forum HLPF 2022 and Way Forward.’ The event was jointly organized by Council for participatory development (CPD), AwazCDS-Pakistan, and Pakistan Development Alliance at Lahore.
AwazCDS in collaboration with Pakistan Development Alliance (PDA) triggered its efforts to strengthen development processes at national level especially after the presentation of Voluntary National Review Report (VNR) at High Level Political Forum 2022 by United Nations. Both the organisations led the civil society engagement processes at the national level and produced spotlight report as well as voluntary local review report in 2022 which were also launched during the event.
Mohammad Zia-ur-Rehman, Chief Executive Awaz CDS-Pakistan & National Chair PDA, said that civil society has done a lot of work in the implementation of SDGs and has aided in the improvement of overall situation in Pakistan. He highlighted the need of inclusion and participation of civil society representatives at the policy level as well as VNR report making process for depiction of real on ground situation and benefiting from the learning of such review reports.
He further said that VNRs provide the opportunity for countries to share their individual experiences, including successes, challenges and lessons learned, with a view to accelerating SDG implementation.
Qaiser Rashid-Additional secretary (planning and budget) Government of Punjab-School Education Department while sharing his thoughts on accelerating SDGs implementation shared that urban areas are more deprived in terms of schools availability than rural areas such as afghan refugee areas and this issue needs focus. He also stressed on the important role of teachers in the education system. He said that it is the teacher who facilitates learning but unfortunately we have an alarming situation at hand where there are more than 100,000 teacher vacancies that keeps on increasing as educators retire without being replaced by new ones.
Raheela Khadim Hussain, Ex Member Assembly, Punjab, from PML – N, discussed the importance of SDGs and said that SDGs are part of our constitution and lie within our outlined basic human rights before being part of the global agenda and hence we should put all resources to use to implement them.
Shahzad Anwer, Pakistan Mission Scoecity appreciated the initiative and recommended that civil society should build a liason so that all civil society organizations and their members of various fields, work on shared SDG goals.
Norail Abbas, representative person with disabilities said that our database is recorded by foreign sources such as world bank but we need to design our own database so that we can have accurate facts and figures. She emphasized on the meaningful engagement of persons with disabilities, women and groups of other religion to ensure no one is left behind to benefit from SDGs.
The event was attended by youth, women, government representatives, academia, lawyers, media, CSO, representatives of Human Rights, Child Rights and Status of women commissions.