By Prince J Musa in Kenema
Ahead of the government report on the progresses made in meeting commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) indicators, the Civil Society Consortium and Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) through the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development on the 19th May engaged stakeholders in Kenema.
The engagement according to officials was to get the views of the different agencies, women groups and youths organizations on the achievement of government on sustainable development goals.
Addressing participants at the meeting, the Assistant Project Coordinator VSO, Samuel Turay said the ministry of planning called specific civil society organizations to mobilize generic patterns to identify the successes and challenges in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, so his organization wants to ensure that the SDG report becomes inclusive where civil society will engage the MDA’s and local authorities with some questions that has been developed by the ministry of planning and economic development on the eleven indicators of sustainable development goals.
He added that their focus is on assessing government’s performance on goal four and six.
Turay said that their objectives is not to under report the progresses made as a nation nor to present a blotted report, as the report of their engagement will be presented to the United Nations General Assembly this year.
He noted that progress has been made in education, adding that for the justice sector there are challenges in ensuring that justice is not administered only to the rich people in society but also those that can’t afford to hire the services of a lawyer but acknowledged much improvement has been made in that direction due to the intervention by Legal Aid Board.
He also noted progresses in attaining Goal Ten, which talks about gender equality through adoptions of measures to address gender based violence such as the “hands off our girls project” and the formation of the girls’ club in schools by the Ministry of Social Welfare.
For education, he said the challenges will be on how the education sector manages the resources allocated to them and the implementation of school feeding programme to ensure school going pupils benefit from the food provided for them.
One of the participants at the engagement who is also from the district human rights committee under the Kenema civil society group, Fallah Albert Bockarie, described the engagement as an important step towards national development.
He said all member countries of the United Nations have subscribed to the SDG since it was moved from Millennium Development to Sustainable Development and it’s important that the sensitization be done at district level to sound the views of the people on government’s achievements.
Bockarie said it will help to deepen the knowledge base of people on Sustainable Development Goals, adding that government has taken human capital development as priority by identifying education for all as pillar one under SDG and also cluster one which is improvement of health care facility.
He added that as a civil society, they will continue to popularize the successes of the government in meeting the SDGs whiles they push them to ensure that they achieve most of the Goals set.
He said every academic year, the government spends 150 billion Leones on education but claimed government needs to increase the number of health personnel to manage maternal mortality.
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