January 2015: “It is impossible to eradicate extreme poverty” in poor countries that are at war, Helen Clark, UN Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator, says in an interview with the ‘Diplomatic Courier.’ Clark also reflects on next steps in negotiations on the post-2015 development agenda, including target and indicator definitions for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), potential challenges “that can wipe progress away,” negotiations among UN Member State, and financing for development (FfD).
Targets and indicators must be action-oriented, measurable and limited in number, Clark says. She explains that an important next step in elaborating upon the SDG set is ensuring that the targets are measurable, rather than statements of intent. Clark recalls that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Synthesis Report offers assistance from the UN system to Member States to meet these requirements.
In response to a question about whether the post-2015 agenda is too broad, Clark explains that sustainable development “is broad.” She acknowledges that addressing the economic, social and environmental strands of sustainable development in a holistic way “is not a narrow agenda,” and encourages prioritizing. She also notes that in the Synthesis Report, Ban accepts the report of the Open Working Group (OWG) on SDG as “the basis for the negotiations,” but also advises looking back at what UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20) asked Member States to do.
Financing for sustainable development is “very, very different from financing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),” Clark adds, explaining that the MDGs were “about financing a gap” between basic benchmarks of development and progress on acheiveing them. By contrast, addressing challenges reflected in a sustainable development agenda requires “a total development financing agenda, not just a ‘gaps’ financing agenda.” Clark describes official development assistance (ODA) as “only a small part of a huge global sustainable development financing agenda.”
In the interview, Clark also highlights the importance of building peaceful and inclusive societies, climate risk adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR), and health systems to cope with epidemics. [UNDP Administrator Interview]