13 August 2018: The World Bank Group has provided an overview of its work on each of the 17 SDGs. The second edition of its publication titled, ‘Implementing the 2030 Agenda,’ outlines the Group’s work on sustainable development, mapped to the Global Goals, and offers a snapshot of projects at local, national, regional and global levels. It also provides insight into the World Bank Group’s cross-cutting initiatives on data, disruptive technologies and finance, among others.
The publication articulates two overarching goals that the World Bank Group has set for the world to achieve by 2030: end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity, which must be met within a sustainable environment. To this end, a Strategic Partnership Framework between the UN and the World Bank Group was signed in May 2018, which aims to enhance cooperation in areas of finance, action on climate change, work in post-crisis and humanitarian settings, and data.
On finance, which the publication identifies as one of the World Bank Group’s “most substantial contributions” towards implementing the SDGs, initiatives aim to increase financial resources, improve domestic resource mobilization (DRM), mobilize the private sector and develop tools that address and support the provision of global public goods. Measures include increasing financial capacity, as agreed by shareholders during the April 2018 Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group, coordinating under the Platform for Collaboration on Tax to reduce illicit financial flows, and piloting a ‘Maximizing Finance for Development’ approach in nine countries.
The World Bank Group has adopted eight SDG indicators verbatim and linked to 45 others across 31 targets and 15 Goals.
The Group has adopted several of the official SDG indicators “verbatim,” enabling the compilation of comparable data that contributes to standardized measurements and common definitions. The World Bank Group has also linked to 45 SDG indicators, covering 31 targets under 15 of the 17 Goals.
Using statistics from the World Bank database, the UN system and other entities, the publication also offers a brief overview of current trends on each of the SDGs. Infographics that visualize the data complement summaries of World Bank initiatives to increase clean cooking and heating, reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, increase mobility and prevent violence in fragile contexts, among other projects and programs.
A preview story by Mahmoud Mohieldin, World Bank Group, notes that the Group’s thematic and sectoral global practices align closely with the SDGs. He also calls for more urgency and focus than has been delivered thus far. [Publication: Implementing the 2030 Agenda: 2018 Update] [World Bank story]