Dear Editor,
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which came into effect in January 2016, now define the development agenda for developing countries over the next fifteen years. They present a good opportunity for Guyana to transform its economy towards sustainable development. Despite this promise, the SDGs have not been elevated in Guyana to the levels of national discourse and community awareness that their importance deserves, an observation made by Prof Clive Thomas on the SDGs in the Sunday Stabroek, Sept-Oct, 2015.
The 17 goals of the SDGs are ambitious and comprehensive, and cover social, economic development, and environmental outcomes. Inter alia, these outcomes include ending poverty and hunger; achieving food security and sustained agricultural development; promoting inclusive (pro-poor) economic growth, sustainable development, and full employment; building resilience against natural and external shocks; ensuring greater equity and fairness in education, income distribution, and among women and girls; making cities and communities inclusive, safe, reliant and sustainable; combating the effects of climate change; protecting and conserving natural resources and ecosystems; ensuring access to essential services such as health, water, sanitation and energy; and revitalizing and strengthening global partnerships for sustainable development. These outcomes are similar to the 15 Foundations for Development in the manifesto of the coalition party currently in government in Guyana. Moreover, the SDGs promise a truly transformative development agenda that is both universal and adaptable to country-specific conditions. So programmes to achieve the SDGs can be designed to address the root or structural causes that have constrained Guyana’s development.
Guyana has made much social and economic progress since independence. But the country still faces several developmental challenges, including low economic growth; high unemployment, especially among youths; a national debt that is a drag on the economy; a high food import bill; high income inequality; significant threats to food security and traditional export-agriculture; and high rates of poverty. These are compelling reasons to embrace the SDGs. But most important, despite the economic progress, sustainable development (ie, good governance, inclusive economic growth, building a resilient environment, and promoting social inclusion), and economic transformation have eluded this country in the post-independence era. The SDGs therefore present a timely opportunity for Guyana to successfully advance along this sustainable and transformative developmental path, and to effectively address its current developmental challenges. But Guyana’s leaders, policy-makers and the private sector will have to act now and aggressively, if Guyana is to reap the full benefits of these SDGs. They must envision a society that is prosperous, politically stable, and provides the citizenry with a sense of inclusiveness and ownership in relation to the process and fruits of development. There should be no compelling reasons for poverty, high income inequality, food insecurity, high unemployment, and non-inclusive economic growth, to be the enduring characteristics of this country.
The SDGs were framed within the context of commitments by the international community to provide much needed resources for countries to achieve these goals. But significantly, 50-80 % of financing of the SDGs will have to come from domestic resource mobilization (DRM). The Addis Ababa Meeting in July 2015, on financing the SDGs, and subsequent work by the World Bank, the IMF and other multilateral development banks, proposed several ways to meet the massive financing needs of the SDGs. These include: (a) increasing tax compliance (not tax increases), and strengthening tax administration; (b) having more efficient ways of public expenditure; (c) by crowd-in private investments—every dollar invested by the public sector should have a private-sector crowd-in multiplier of 4 to 10 additional dollars in public investments (ie, public-private-partnerships); (d) tapping into the capital markets where large pools of funds can be raised and mobilized for long-term investments, eg, pension funds, and establishing bond markets, such as infrastructure bonds, diaspora bonds, thematic bonds on health, youth employment, etc); and cross-border financing, by establishing alliances with other Caricom countries to integrate capital markets as is the case of the Pacific Alliance (Colombia with Mexico, Peru, and Chile).
Among other things, two pre-conditions are absolutely necessary to support investments for the SDGs. First, an economic, regulatory and predictable investment environment must be engendered for the private sector to become engaged with the SDGs. Second, a dedicated unit/agency with a cadre of persons with the technical competencies in public and private sector investment finance and management, and the ability to capture the financial and technical dispensations that would be available from the international community to support the SDGs at the national level should be created.
In summary, the SDGs present a good opportunity for Guyana to reactivate its economy along a development trajectory that will appreciably enhance the general living standards of the population. But financing of the SDGs will require large and sustained amounts of investment funds (the literature refers to this as “from billions to trillions of dollars”!). The government cannot, and should not do this alone. Much of this financing will have to be sourced from domestic resource mobilization and public-private-partnerships, in addition to traditional Overseas Development Assistance (ODAs), and Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs). Finally, Guyana’s leaders, policy-makers and the private sector must act now, as a matter of urgency, to reap the full benefits which the SDGs promise.
Yours faithfully,
Ballayram