What's Going On Post-2015?

Have you heard of the Millennium Development Goals? A series of 8 international development targets set at a UN gathering at the turn of the 21st Century. Friday (5th April) marks 1000 days until these goals expire in 2015. The question of what will happen after these goals has been a hot topic for a couple of years now, and consultations are in full swing.

What's happening?

A WAGGGS representative adressing the Bali Meeting

Last week was the final meeting of the High Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda and it took place in Bali, Indonesia. They'll report back to the Secretary General on the UN, and that will feed into the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Summit due to take place in September 2013 during the General Assembly. All of this consultation and discussion is leading up to the decision on what the international development framework will look like after the MDGs expire in 2015. I've been following this process from a youth perspective and Katie, who was in Bali as a Plan UK Youth Ambassador, has given a lowdown on the Bali event in her blog.

There was also an International NGO Conference in Bonn, which WAGGGS attended and have described in their summary of the Bonn and Bali events.

Read 'The Global Conversation Begins' online!

What's top of the agenda?

So there was some feeding back last week too with a 2nd Summary Report from the My World platform and a report called "The Global Conversation Begins" which is a snapshot of initial findings from all the Post-2015 consultations so far.

In the My World survey: education, healthcare, honest governments and clean water are the top 4 priorities globally for both men and women. Men place more importance on jobs, whereas women rate gender equality higher (but still only 8th). There is an interesting discussion of the case for gender equality and why deciding the goals through a purely democratic survey might not be the way to get the best end result:

"The number of women that have participated in MY World is slightly higher than the number of men (51% women). Although the ranking of “Equality between men and women” is higher for women (8th) than for men (15th), overall it features very low as a priority. The result is largely age neutral, but there are some slight differences depending on education level (a greater priority for both men and women with higherlevels of education) and Human Development Index (men and women in high and very high HDI countries give greater priority to gender equality). In the first offline representative survey conducted in Liberia, gender equality ranked higher for women in urban rather than rural areas.

There is a huge literature - backed up by practical experience – that shows how vital gender equality is for development not just in and of itself, but also its instrumental nature in reaching other goals. This serves to highlight one of the limitations of a survey of this nature; there is a riskborne out in this case – that critical development objectives can be underemphasized. This can be so partly because of the characteristics of the respondent, and also because the full multipliers are not well understood by all participants. Given the prevalence of men at policy decision - making levels, this tends to support the case for a standalone goal that looks at all aspects of women’s empowerment: access to services, economy and jobs, political representation."

What's next?

This timeline from the Guardian gives you a rough overview of where this process has been, and where it aims to go in the next 6 months. It'll all culminate in a summit at the General Assembly in September this year.

How can I get involved?

I'm now a Post-2015 volunteer for the World Association Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) so I may well have some exciting things for you to get involved with that will be shared through this blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts. In the meantime, you can vote on what your top priorities are on the My World Platform. Is simple to do, takes less than 5 minutes, and you could help shape the course of the world's future development agenda.