Who stole the SDGs?
Have the sustainable development goals been hijacked?
In response to Harry Ven’s comment on my earlier article.
UNESCO’s position on this is clear: education is first and foremost a public responsibility that requires increased public domestic investment and increased bilateral and multilateral support. While UNESCO encourages public-private partnerships to realize the right to education, these must be based on equity, inclusion and national ownership, benefit the most vulnerable and operate within the framework of state-regulated standards and norms.
As the lead coordinating agency for SDG4 and Education 2030, the commitment of UNESCO is to sustain political momentum for education, increase national capacities, advocate for additional financing and strengthen international cooperation to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all, including through improved governance and monitoring. The UNESCO Education 2030 Framework for Action, endorsed by the global community last November, clearly cautions that successful partnerships with the private sector will require effective coordination and regulatory mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability.
It’s on this last point where, I believe, things fall down and the global intent of SDG4 is open to deliberate misinterpretation to commercial operations who on the one hand declare that they are on a humanitarian mission but on the other, as we’ve seen in my original article, prioritise profit over mission. Indeed UNESCO published a report via their website on behalf of Pearson that showed it was their intention for:
“increasing the impact of growth to its business with seven targets, to be achieved by 2025.”
Angelo Gavrielatos, Project Director for Education International told me that:
“It’s interesting to see the reinterpretation of the goals by one of the Founding Partners. A comparison of Pearson Target 1A and SDG4 Target 1 is very telling. The word FREE is conspicuous by its absence.
Also, Pearson often, as part of its self-professed “commitment” to the “quality teacher agenda”, goes to great lengths to talk about how central teachers are to the achievement of quality education for all yet, in this document, teachers are not mentioned once.”
Indeed it’s hard to consolidate the report published by Pearson, in concert with UNESCO, with what appears to be the business intent of one of their investments. Indeed what appears to be a consortium of industrialists has backed a re-branding of the Sustainable Development Goals as Global Goals copyrighted by Project Everyone, a private company incorporated and registered in London.
So what is happening here?
It would seem that the SDGs that were launched to great fanfare in 2015 are being hijacked to potentially realign them with the kind of free market enterprises which got the planet into trouble in the first place. As questioned by Global Policy Watch:
“Are the many NGOs and celebrities that are supporting and sponsoring the Global Goals and related activities aware that this is a private initiative not a global public good? To be sure, it is important that everyone knows about the SDGs. A huge campaign with private sector support could be a realistic way of communicating the 17 goals to everyone. But these goals belong to the public and the UN should safeguard their use. And to over-simplify global challenges is not the purpose of the UN and misrepresents the delicate and politically complex balance that went into crafting the new Agenda for 2030 that the governments are approving today.”
To answer your original question “Do you think anything can be done to prevent such things happening?”.
The SDGs were established by global agreement for the benefit of our species so first, the organisations behind them need to be held to account. Second, national governments need to be held to account in support of their own citizens and third, we all need to stop looking the other way when it’s obvious that organisations, commercial or otherwise, are falling short of the implicit obligations of these goals or corrupting them. That includes the shareholders of publicly quoted companies like Pearson.
Meanwhile back in Liberia it has been reported that, Pearson backed, Bridge International Academies are refusing to accept a randomised control trial (RCT) as part of an agreement to participate in the nations “Partnership Schools for Liberia” programme.
Curious too that BIA are also backed by Mark Zuckerberg whose Facebook corporation already made a failed attempt to win the Indian market via its Free Basics initiative where it was reported in The Guardian that:
“Where Zuckerberg saw the endless promise of a digital future, Indians came to see something more sinister. Seventeen months later, Facebook’s grand plans to bring India online had been halted by overwhelming local opposition — the biggest stumbling block the company had hit in its 12-year-history. In the end, it seemed, Facebook had acted as if it was giving India a gift. But it was not a gift Indians wanted.”
