(117): Capturing the imagination of ordinary people: Communicating SDGs at the grass-roots level

In September 2008 the world was hit by a storm, you might even call it an economic hurricane that had not been seen since the great depression of the 1930s.  Lehman Brothers had fallen, financial crisis was now real. As a journalist working in Bush House at the time, one of my responsibilities was to ensure the public understood what the financial crisis was about and how it would make an impact on their lives.

One of my duties was to translate stories about the crisis from English to my native Hausa language. My colleagues working in Swahili, Arabic, Urdu and Somali sections did the same. But how do you make sure that a farmer in Mogadishu, a herdsman in the outskirts of Yaounde or a small-scale trader in   Karachi understands the difference between economic depression and economic recession in his native language without much explanation? How do you translate ‘credit crunch’ or ‘economic turmoil’ to a non-English speaker in the simplest term to avoid any confusion?

This was the debate we were having in the newsroom. Then one of our editors intervened. “When you are writing your story, think of your grandmother who had not been to school. If she can understand the story, then you are communicating,” he said.

The question to ask is, are we communicating the SDGs in a way that our grandmothers who have not been to school can understand? You will agree with me that the target beneficiaries of the SDGs are the ordinary people in different parts of the world. Unlike the MDGs, the SDGs are different because developing countries were part and parcel of formulating them. But are citizens of these countries, in whose names the SDGs are being implemented, fully informed about the 2030 agenda?

In his classic book, “Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty,” Nobel Laurette Muhammad Yunus stated that he considers giving credit to the poor to end hunger in the world as a human right issue. I must add that communicating the global goals to empower the citizens of our member countries is a fundamental human right. Writing in the London Guardian during the debates on the post-MDGs agenda, Judith Randel, then Executive Director of Development Initiative, stated that “based on our experience and available evidence, we believe the post-2015 settlement must harness the power of technology and information to empower citizens with choice and control over the decisions that impact their lives.”

During the negotiations on the SDGs, Ireland’s permanent representative to the United Nations, David Donoghue, stated that to achieve the SDGs, there is need “in some way to capture the imagination of ordinary people around the world.”

The good news is some countries have understood this. Netherlands has developed a communication plan for communicating the SDGs at the grass-roots level particularly by targeting young people. The SDGs have been integrated in school curriculum as part of the strategy for inclusive dialogue and consultation.  Indonesia, an IsDB member country making headway in the implementation of the SDGs, has developed a monitoring dashboard for the SDGs called Satu Data Initiative (https://www.satu-indonesia.com/satu/) and the website is available in local language. Any user can visit the dashboard and select any of the SDGs to see the report card on the success recorded so far. A Reverse Linkage between Indonesia, IsDB and other member countries on how to develop an SDGs dashboard could be a good starting point.

This article was published in SDGs Digest, Issue 7, March 2019 https://books.isdb.org/view/65198/4/