The Agenda, with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals, is universal and calls for action by all countries, both developed countries and developing countries, to ensure no one is left behind. For this, SDG 17 has ambitious targets regarding the finance, technology, capacity building and trade.
Progress on some means of implementation targets is moving rapidly: personal remittances are at an all-time high, an increasing proportion of the global population has access to the Internet and the Technology Bank for the Least Developed Countries has been established. Yet, significant challenges remain: Official Development Assistance is declining (approximatively 4% for Africa for example), private investment flows are not well aligned with sustainable development, there continues to be a significant digital divide: over 80% in developed countries are online, compared to 45% in developing countries and 20% in least developed countries.
The Shaping Fair Cities project fully applies the partnership principle: the project has partners from 10 countries from European Union, and 2 non EU ones, Albania and Mozambique, putting at work local and regional administrations, as well as CSOs to implement roadmaps to achieve Sustainable Goals on Gender Equality, Sustainable Cities, Climate Change, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. The partnership for the Goals means also that actors involved in the project learn from other countries’ experience and lessons in working towards SDG implementation.
In Italy
The ASviS 2018 Report shows a significant improvement from 2014 to 2016 mainly due to the amount of funds allocated to public development aid (APS). However, the need to invest more in development cooperation emerges.
The Italian legislative activity of the last year has been characterized by some progress, like for example the complete implementation of the Law 125 of 2014 "General discipline for international development cooperation", at a cost of five million euro in the APS (equal to 0.29% of the gross national income, RNL) to the change made by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS) of the guidelines for the registration of civil society organizations in the list of subjects admitted to the public financing of cooperation initiatives, but also to the interruption of the process of the national law on fair trade, important for defining and recognizing the sector, and guaranteeing better opportunities for disadvantaged producers in developing countries.
Find out more about SDG 17