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.
