With the Covid-19 outbreak of 2019, the implementation and process toward achieving SDG goals have been delayed. Continuing and implementing measures that can allow us to work towards these goals have become increasingly important since they represent ways in which to improve the quality of life. Although the Covid-19 outbreak had limited ways in which we can achieve these goals at the rates before, there are ways in which to still work towards these goals.
The United Nations response to Covid-19 to get us back on track on being able to achieve UN SDG goals are:
1. Ensuring that essential health services are still available and protecting health systems;
2. Helping people cope with adversity, through social protection and basic services;
3. Protecting jobs, supporting small and medium-sized enterprises, and informal sector workers through economic response and recovery programmes;
4. Guiding the necessary surge in fiscal and financial stimulus to make macroeconomic policies work for the most vulnerable and strengthening multilateral and regional responses; and
5. Promoting social cohesion and investing in community-led resilience and response systems
Mandate number 5 on promoting social cohesion and investing community-led resilience and response systems is vital for the general public to help achieve and maintain UN SDG goals. Communities must be at the centre of all efforts as we have the power to incite positive change within the world and to help facilitate much of the UN SDG efforts. Although this has been increasingly hard due to lockdown procedures globally, as well as social distancing protocol, there are other means to work to achieve on maintaining strength within the community to help mitigate the costly effects Covid-19 had on UN SDG goals and efforts.
Even with these obstacles in place, the United Nations still allow for inclusive social dialogue, advocacy and political engagement. They had allowed for a deployment of multidisciplinary expert teams to facilitate such spaces and discussions. Being a participatory part of the UN SDG realm can be done digitally to reprimand the social distancing protocols and this discourse of knowledge sharing, strategic planning as well as community building and community resilience is the next step into allowing for UN SDG goals to be continued to be worked on during this pandemic. Moreover, by empowering these communities through these various knowledge bases provided digitally, there is a potential increasing outreach and information readily available.
With the United Nations focus on empowering and connecting community-based organizations and networks, there are ways to circumvent the negativity caused by Covid-19. Although there is much focus on gathering data on within the United Nations protocols to deal with Covid-19 in regards to achieving UN SDG goals, there is a facet within the digital realm that can help not only achieve UN SDG goals, but to also open up a new realm of possibility in the way we think, enact and appropriate the UN SDGs. With increasing information sharing, expertise and knowledge on the UN SDGs can be expanded and outreached to numerous communities.
As a reminder, these suggestions are not made to undermine the other factors that Covid- 19 had elicited such as maintaining accessible health services for the public, especially for those disenfranchised and those more at risk. Rather this article is intended to think about ways in which you can still help contribute towards achieving UN SDG goals within this global pandemic. Although we can look at the negative sides of Covid-19 and its destruction and limitation not only towards the UN SDG goals, but through numerous issues pertaining to physical, mental, psychological well-being, Covid-19 can also help us think of different methodologies and ideologies in how to approach achieving UN SDG goals.
Resources Used:
https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/un_framework_report_on_covid-19.pdf