XUNICEF News and Views

A member shared a link to this report. As it was on LINKEDIN, we have had a look and have shared the direct link for XUNICEF staff not on LINKEDIN.  While Jeffrey Sachs can be controversial, it is worth the read.  This work of SDSN is the result of collaboration and research of 1000s of acadmic institutions and partnerships.

From Kul Gautam This statement is utterly despicable! The US is completely isolated at the UNGA (with the possible opportunistic exception of Israel) when it comes to its hostile stance on SDGs and Agenda 2030, which was negotiated and agreed with full US participation. To imply that the SDGs are China-centric or inspired by China is a total fabrication. The SDGs were NOT on the agenda of the 2024 US election, and I bet few voters knowingly opposed them. Kul

  Click here for the article Summary The 2025 Sustainable Development Goals Report offers a comprehensive assessment of global progress at the midpoint of the 2030 Agenda. 

Article shared by Kul Gautam At the recent IMF/World Bank meetings, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the Trump administration's "America First" credo did not mean "America Alone".

From Robert Cohen   This happened yesterday at the UNGA, In summary: "The United States strongly supports efforts to sustain peace and pursue diplomatic solutions to crises around the world. The country firmly supports individual rights, including freedoms of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and religion or belief, as these are fundamental to America's security and the promotion of tolerance, mutual respect, and peace globally. However, the United States has decided to call a vote on this resolution due to concerns that it reaffirms the Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The U.S. government believes that Agenda 2030 and the SDGs advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with American interests and rights.

 Invitation shared by Fouad Kronfol Join us for an insightful webinar as we discuss bias within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) with Adam Sneyd and Ruby Dagher. 

The 2024 edition of the SDG report presents some fascinating findings. Chapter 3 on government support for UN-based multilateralism is especially revealing - very worrying that the world's most powerful countries lag behind in their commitment to multilateralism. Equally disappointing is the vastly inflated spending on military budgets versus ODA. Kul

On World Children's Day – a global day dedicated to children – we call on the world to accelerate efforts to protect and fulfill the rights of every chi...

Queen Rania of Jordan is in New York alongside her husband, King Abdullah II, who is attending the 78th United Nations General Assembly. While in the Big Apple, the Queen attended the UNICEF’s Champions for Children: Child Rights at the Heart of the SDGs reception alongside Queen Mathilde of Belgium and US First Lady Jill Biden. The reception, hosted by UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell, took place on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. The First Lady was the keynote speaker at the event that “aims to place children at the heart of achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by focusing on their empowerment and the need to invest in their future,” according to Her Majesty’s Office. The event was specifically organised around the release of a new UNICEF report that addresses progress on child-specific indicators in SDGs, which highlighted the chance to influence children’s futures. Unfortunately, two-thirds of child-related indicators aren’t on pace with the S...

"Excellencies, distinguished guests, and friends of UNICEF, it is a real privilege to welcome you to UNICEF House. Thank you for being here. "We will hear a great deal over the next few days about the Sustainable Development Goals. The SDGs are an amazing blueprint. They represent the coming together of the international community to make commitments to each other and to people in every corner of the world to achieve lasting peace and prosperity for people and the planet; to end poverty and inequality; to ensure universal access to health care, education and other essential services; and to spur economic growth; all while tackling the climate crisis and preserving critical biodiversity. "They are bold goals, but at the halfway mark of the 2030 Agenda, we are rapidly running out of time to turn the promise of the SDGs into reality. "Tonight, UNICEF will issue a new report which shows that we are on track to meet barely one-third of the child-related SDG targets. ...

Halfway into the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), only one-third of child-related targets are on course, shows a new report of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) released on Monday. Click here to read or download the report Only 6 percent of the child population, or 150 million children, living in just 11 countries have reached 50 percent of child-related targets met, according to the report, "Progress on Children's Well-Being: Centring child rights in the 2030 Agenda." If expected progress continues, only 60 countries - home to just 25 percent of the overall child population - will have met their SDG targets by 2030, leaving around 1.9 billion children in 140 countries behind, according to the report. Today, a child born in a low-income country is seven times more likely to live in a country where child-related SDGs require acceleration than a child born in a high-income country. Globally, of the 48 child-related SDG targets, 33 percent were o...

Thank you, Cathy for asking me to join you for this very special evening as we begin a week of engagement around the UN General Assembly. It’s wonderful to be here with so many colleagues and friends – Rania, Mathilde, Agata, and Philippa serving alongside you as First Lady of the United States is the honor of my life. Good evening. I’ve been an educator for 39 years. This past week I started teaching writing at a community college near the White House. So, I’ve seen how one moment can change the trajectory of a student’s learning – when their eyes light up as an idea clicks into place. Education is the key that unlocks the possibilities of the future. It changes lives. But, in the United States, as in the rest of the world, COVID and its aftermath have had a devasting impact on children’s learning. I know we all have been working hard to rebuild the systems that were broken, to bring divided communities back together, to put us on a path to a better, brighter future. Every leader, and...

Are you ready to redouble your efforts to create a better world for all? This, or something like this, is the recommendation of The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023 , a special edition report by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, or DESA as we know it. According to SG Guterres, the report calls for a Rescue Plan for People and Planet , because "the Sustainable Development Goals are disappearing in the rear view mirror". This threw me off my rails and I woke up, because things are disappearing in the rear view mirror when you are ahead of them, not when they are still are distant dream in front of you.

Bucking the system: the extraordinary story of how the SDGs came to be Richard Jolly will be 90 next year.Credit: Institute of Development Studies (IDS) A Development Economist in the United Nations: Reasons for Hope Richard Jolly Routledge (2022) Paula Caballero (right) and Patti Londoño led what they call a rogue operation to create the SDGs.Credit: Alamy Redefining Development: The Extraordinary Genesis of the Sustainable Development Goals Paula Caballero with Patti Londoño Lynne Rienner Publishers (2022) Click here for the original article Next week, world leaders will meet in New York City to assess progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There’s no varnishing it: the meeting will be a damp squib. Halfway to the SDGs’ 2030 deadline, none of the 17 goals to end poverty and protect the environment is on track, and only 15% of the 140 targets for which data are available look likely to be met. Progress towards the remaining 29 targets cannot be assessed....

In 2015, the nations of the world solemnly committed themselves to ending poverty and hunger and substantially improving the living standards of the global majority by 2030. This commitment was given form through 17 Sustainable Development Goals. They are a long way from being met and some have gone backwards since 2015. Next month, world leaders will meet again at the United Nations in New York to mark the midpoint in the process to 2030. Negotiators and some UN officials were working to get progress back on track. Their tool was a new global declaration that acknowledged the goals were way off being met and committed governments to accelerate their efforts to advance the living standards of the global majority. A draft of that declaration has been reported by Devex. It will remain a draft after the United States, backed up by five of its closest allies, vetoed it. In particular, these countries rejected calls for the necessary reforms to the international financial system and major ...

The United States, United Kingdom, and a handful of allied powers have blocked agreement on a draft declaration that advocates the need to accelerate progress on a set of critical development goals at a major summit at the United Nations headquarters next month. The Biden administration objected to a series of key provisions in the draft, including calls to reform the international financial system and establish a multibillion-dollar development stimulus plan. The move has thrown a spanner into high-level diplomatic talks over the fate of the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which will mark their midpoint in September amid growing doubts they will be achieved. The U.S. raised concern over several provisions dealing with the reform of the financial system, including a call to overhaul the international financial architecture, creating new, expanded debt relief for vulnerable countries, and urging multilateral development banks to mobilize additional financing. The U.S. also exp...

The UN must suspend the SDGs to tackle more urgent crises | Chatham House The author, Jon Lidén is Founder and Director, Anthropos Development Click here for the original article The Sustainable Development Goals – the targets adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 – are truly extraordinary. When taken together and at face value, they are not so much a programme of 17 targets as a blueprint for a utopian global society. The aim was for a world free from extreme poverty, with no hunger, with universal access to affordable healthcare and education, major diseases eliminated, gender equality, climate change and biodiversity addressed, conflicts resolved through international collaboration. And all this was to be achieved within 15 years. We are now a little more than halfway through that timeframe with seven years left. "The Sustainable Development Goals are disappearing in the rear-view mirror – and with them the hope and rights of current and future generations -  United Natio...

UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned on Monday that the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is turning into a “mirage of what might have been,” at the opening of the Financing for Development Forum (FfD), taking place at UN Headquarters in New York. FfD is convening as the global economy continues to be battered by a series of crises, in an attempt to transform the international financial system, and get the internationally-agreed 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development back on track. The Secretary-General pointed to reports showing that, since the pandemic, the richest one percent of people around the world have captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world combined. Inequalities within some countries, he said , are regressing towards early 20th Century levels, a time when women did not have the right to vote; and before widespread acceptance of the concept of social protection. The UN’s SDG Stimulus Plan , explained the UN chief, aims to boost inves...