IF the Philippines and other Asean member-economies want to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), or the world’s post-2015 agenda, greater cooperation among them is necessary, according to the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda).
Economic Planning Secretary Arsenio M. Balisacan said individual members of the Asean cannot achieve the SDGs on their own, as these goals also require cooperation in the region.
“Given our respective resources and experiences, we are encouraged to make our discussions for strategic collaboration go beyond commerce and financial assistance,” Balisacan said. “The areas we may consider revisiting include regional disaster risk-reduction and management; social protection, technology access and transfer; data generation and management; and capacity, building of local institutions.”
Balisacan said to improve the region’s efforts, there’s a need to review the Asean Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response, and to strengthen the points of collaboration among member-states.
He added that there is a need to integrate lessons learned from recent phenomena, like Supertyphoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan), into country and regional strategies for disaster resilience.
“Aside from being an instrument that helps our citizens in managing shocks from disasters, this initiative is also crucial given the increasing interaction of our communities through in-migration and the changes our citizens have to go through during the early stages of the Asean integration,” he said.
Balisacan also underscored the need for support and regional collaborations to address data limitations, which hamper strategic development planning and programming.
National Statistician Lisa Grace S. Bersales said earlier national statistical systems worldwide have stressed that providing data needed to track the performance of countries on the SDGs would be difficult.
Bersales said providing data for around 300 indicators will require innovative ways to source and collect data. Innovations, such as Big Data culled from administrative records or even the Internet, would be needed to track the goals.
“It is important to invest in good-quality and up-to-date data and improve our knowledge-management technologies and capacities so we can prepare sound, evidence-based plans and policies post-2015,” Balisacan said.
The SDGs were proposed to have 17 goals and 169 targets to be achieved by the year 2030. The SDGs and their relevance to post-2015 development priorities in the Asean region are currently being reviewed.
Last year the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that opened an opportunity for the integration of the SDGs into the post-2015 agenda, both of which will be finalized at the UNGA in September.