Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) will publish a new study every February to measure the government’s progress in implementing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), president of the agency Abou Bakr El-Gendy announced.
MDGs are part of the development agenda supported by United Nations. El-Gendy said these focus on how the world needs to transform and tackle the numerous challenges facing millions of people worldwide. He said an integrated approach to sustainable development is how best to reach these goals by 2030.
At the “Sustainable Development 2030” conference on Sunday, El-Gendy said there are 17 main SDGs that Egypt has to achieve. At the United Nations general assembly in 2015, Egypt agreed to implement policies to address economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development in an integrated way. This specific method allows this progress to be monitored.
Some indicators need to be developed for monitoring and measuring the implementation, he said, adding that these methods will depend on the availability of data, and the capacity for finding the most trustworthy results of the government’s efforts to implement those targets.
A concrete national system must be built to collect data and produce indicators regularly, he said.
Minister of International Cooperation Sahar Nasr agreed that this data is of paramount importance. Without clear statistics, it will not be possible for the government to provide suitable policies, which would lead Egypt away from the targeted goals, she added.
The government must cooperate with the private sector, civil society, and development partners such as the UN, Nasr added.
Maisa Shawky, an expert in National Population Council, said that previous development plans did not consider the population aspect, explaining that almost 80% of sustainable development depends on the people.
The council is developing a strategy to deal with the soaring birth rate. At the current rate, Egypt’s population will reach 128-144 million by 2030, and will result in almost 13.2 million unemployed people by 2020, and 17 million by 2030. Further, every Egyptian will lose 30% of his share of the GDP by 2030, she noted.
