10 September 2015: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) need to be measured by the commitment of countries, in terms of their effort to accelerate progress, and not by whether they met a given target, argues a post on the UN Development Programme (UNDP) blog, titled ‘Avoid stigma when measuring SDG achievements.’ The goals and targets should only serve as aspirations, the piece suggests.

The author, Degol Hailu, Bureau for Policy and Programme Support (BPPS), identifies several shortcomings in monitoring the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): the MDG reports stigmatized countries that showed slow but positive progress by labeling them as “lagging,” “sluggish” and “off track;” the country comparisons were inaccurate, since the goals and targets, which were global averages and uniform across countries, penalized countries that started from low levels; and the methodology for measuring MDG progress underestimated the relatively good performance made by the least developed countries (LDCs), particularly Sub-Saharan African countries.

Hailu cautions that comparing SDG achievements among countries will disadvantage those whose starting point is far from the indicators’ maximum or minimum boundaries, and says natural constraints can make it harder to improve targets further as the indicators approach the minimum possible boundary.

In order to avoid labeling countries as “failures,” the article suggests, measuring progress towards the SDGs: should recognize the differences between targets’ initial levels across countries; must account for effort appreciation, as targets will be harder to achieve when a country’s baseline indicator is approaching its upper or lower limits; and should move away from global and regional level analysis to more localized measurements of performance. [UNDP ‘Our Perspectives’ Post]