Thomson Reuters Foundation/Bogota


As far as the new UN development goals go, Colombia has done more than any other country - at least, in one respect.
In April, the South American nation became the first to include the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in its national development plan, and has already set up a commission to oversee implementation of the goals.
World leaders have yet to officially adopt the 17 SDGs, ranging from ending poverty and hunger to reducing child mortality and achieving gender equality by 2030, but are due to endorse them at the United Nations later this month.
For the head of Colombia’s national planning department, Simon Gaviria, the event is a matter of pride.
“Colombia proposed the SDGs to the United Nations,” Gaviria told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in his office.
Gaviria said Colombian foreign ministry officials were at the United Nations headquarters in New York on May 27, 2011, to propose a set of new ‘sustainable development’ goals, a phrase he said Colombia first coined.
They discussed how the new goals, to replace the eight UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expiring this year, would be designed to apply to richer countries too, he recalled.
“The MDGs were kind of a task given by more developed countries to less developed countries. The SDGs require that we all make an effort as a world,” said Gaviria, an economist and former congressmen, who also heads the commission to track implementation of the goals.
With 20% of all teenage girls pregnant or having given birth, Colombia failed to meet its target to reduce teen pregnancy to 15% by 2015 as part of the MDGs.
In Colombia, rape at the hands of relatives and stepfathers fuels high rates of teenage pregnancy, rights groups say.
Gaviria said there would be a renewed focus on tackling the problem over the next 15 years.
“When you look at the MDGs, our biggest challenge clearly was issues that had to do with gender - sexual and reproductive health and teenage pregnancy - that was the goal that Colombia didn’t meet. We’re doubling our efforts to improve in that regard,” he said.
Part of the solution lies in better co-ordination between ministries, such as education and health, to tackle teenage pregnancy which Gaviria described as a “terrible poverty trap”.
Experts say not enough has been done to expand and improve sex education in schools, particularly in rural areas.
Another key priority for the middle-income country of 47mn, where 4mn Colombians have been lifted out of poverty in the past five years, is child malnutrition.
Extreme poverty, a lack of drinking water and poor sanitation in parts of rural Colombia, along with low levels of breastfeeding, drive child malnutrition, Gaviria said.
Child malnutrition, defined as low weight for the child’s age, is exacerbated by Colombia’s huge urban/rural divide with indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups - many living in rural and jungle areas and along the Pacific Coast - disproportionately affected, Gaviria said.
He expects government funding to improve nutrition will more than double over the next four years to $2.7bn with 2mn children targeted.
To ensure results at grassroots level, local mayors and governors should invest in programmes that promote breastfeeding for the first six months of a child’s life, which experts say is a key way to curb child malnutrition, Gaviria said.
Weight monitoring programmes for babies and other early warning systems that can better detect cases of malnutrition at an early stage will also be introduced, Gaviria said.
In La Guajira, a northern, desert, drought-prone province, where the Wayuu nomadic tribe struggles to feed their children, initiatives must focus on pregnant women and babies to ensure they receive enough food rations and fortified milk, he said.
In the past eight years, nearly 300 children have died from hunger in La Guajira, government figures show. “We need to ensure La Guajira doesn’t happen again,” Gaviria said.
Experts say the government must ensure tighter oversight over free school meals to monitor the amount and quality of food, such as rice, meat and beans, every pupil receives.
The onus of transforming policy into action largely falls on local mayors and governors across Colombia’s 32 provinces, who have a big say in how government funds are allocated and spent.
“In November we start working with newly-elected governors and mayors to make sure that they include the SDGs in their local development plans,” Gaviria said, adding that officials would also receive training on the SDGs.
Experts estimate that it will cost between $3.3tn and $4.5tn each year to finance the 17 new development goals.
In Colombia, Latin America’s fourth-biggest oil producer, much of the investment needed will come from oil. Taxes and royalties from oil make up 20% of government revenue.
Despite the global fall in oil prices, Congress has already approved funding for the goals for the next four years, based on government projections of $48 per barrel in 2015, rising to $60 per barrel in 2018, Gaviria said.
“Every SDG metric has a line budget. How we’re investing our money is very much aligned with the SDGs,” he said.