UNDP has been organizing a series of international webinars on awareness-raising and dissemination on the 2030 Agenda, the SDGs and the process of Localization. UCLG was invited to participate in the latest iteration of the series, a webinar on Localizing the SDGs: Tools and Good Practices from Africa - A Practical Webinar for UNDP Country Offices
The webinar was an opportunity for several international institutions and partners committed to the localization process and agenda to present the current outcomes, expectations and results of localization worldwide, with a specific focus on the African region and direct dialogue with UNDP country officers and local governments representatives in the continent.
The webinar was a valuable opportunity for the Global Observatory on Local Democracy and Decentralization (GOLD) to present, on behalf of UCLG and the Global Taskforce, the results of their report Towards the Localization of the SDGs, presented at the 2018 HLPF last July and available online at this link.
UCLG shared the floor with UNDP representatives from the offices in Addis Ababa, as well as with country officers from Cape Verde and Uganda, who presented local stories of localization, cross-institutional and cross-border alliances, pilot projects of local implementation, and several examples of good practices, institutional dialogues and awareness-raising activities in their countries.
The webinar was a useful opportunity to broadcast to an audience of thirty attendees the work that the GTF, UNDP and UN-Habitat have done together for the LocalizingtheSDGs.org online platform, which for the past two years has offered local and regional governments around the world a place to share their own practices, activities and experiences, and a hub to foster knowledge-sharing and mutual learning. The website hosts today a library of almost 400 SDG-related publications, information on over 270 events, and a collection of 238 stories, telling first-hand accounts of activities and initiatives for the localization of the global goals. The website also hosts the learning modules that UCLG, UNDP and UN-Habitat are developing together to promote peer-to-peer learning and knowledge-exchange.
The next webinar will be dedicated to French-speaking countries in Africa: speakers include UNDP, UCLG and country officers from Algeria and Senegal. The webinar will take place on Tuesday, September 4, 2018, at 15:00 CEST (16:00 in Addis Ababa, 9:00 in New York). Anyone interested in attending the event can access via this Skype link: https://meet.lync.com/undp-org/catharina.klingspor/9D7H32KW.
The webinar series curated by UNDP is a valuable reminder of the need for the local and regional governments’ constituency to share, learn and teach constantly on the process of localization: no actual achievement or implementation of the global goals will ever be possible without the full commitment of local and regional governments. GOLD will be continuing its monitoring and research activities with the GOLD V report in 2019, and a third report to the 2019 HLPF.
- For any information and for sharing your own stories on local initiatives, policies and practices of localization, please contact [email protected], and visit localizingthesdgs.org.
