The G7 and the Global Goals
Focus on the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda.
If we look at the numbers of the current youth population — young people between the ages of 10 and 24 — it is the largest it has ever been: 1.8 billion, 600 million of them are girls, and a majority living in countries that have yet to reach their full development potential.
They are the world’s best hope for addressing our most pressing challenges of development, global peace and security. And to defeat extremist ideologies.
It is both a moral obligation and a strategic investment for us all to pay greater attention to youth and unlock opportunities in youth activism. We should be asking ourselves more frequently how can young people themselves be the heart of the solution, identifying together areas to pursue with renewed vigour, even though our approach needs to be holistic, integrated and multidimensional as is the challenge of sustainable development.
Education remains on top of our agenda, both at home and abroad: domestically by increasing our efforts towards education for sustainable development in school and university curricula; in our partner countries by contributing to programs that make education accessible and inclusive, and more than ever in those contexts of emergency and humanitarian need where we cannot put education on the side and risk losing generations of young people. But also with a special priority on empowering those 600 million young women mentioned earlier. In these young women lies an extraordinary potential for achieving the 2030 Agenda.
Regarding Italy’s effort to implement the 2030 Agenda, we have taken its universal nature very seriously.
Domestically we are “looking at ourselves in the mirror” — as we speak — in order to finalize a National Strategy of Sustainable Development by the end of the year, or the early months of 2017 at the latest. The Strategy will be presented at the next UN High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development in New York (July 2017) as part of our National Voluntary Review.
This will also include our external Strategy, whose main pillar is represented by our Development Cooperation, currently in the final stages of review in order to better align itself with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Last but not least we are pushing the EU to finalise its strategies as well.
Our G7 Presidency and those that will follow, but also the G20 Presidencies, will have a crucial leadership role to play in order to firmly move “from vision to action” in the implementation of the SDGs.
This will be the spirit that will guide our G7 Presidency in many sectors of the development agenda — from food security to education, from migration to women’s empowerment, including an emphasis on Africa — and the spirit that we encourage our G7/G20 partners to help us spread worldwide in order to be more ambitious and more transformative.
That’s what the 2030 Agenda encourages us to do, at both the global and local levels. Because it’s fundamentally a mandate for every single individual, every community, every country, every region, that to fulfil the 2030 Agenda and its Goals.
Excerpts from a guest blog post co-authored by Cristiano Maggipinto, Chief of Unit IX — Evaluation and Visibility, Directorate General for Development Cooperation, Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, on ONE.org.
For more on Taormina and our dispatches about the Italian presidency of the G7 in 2017, follow our G7inUS publication here on Medium and Medium Italiano, or follow us on Twitter. For the official channel of the G7 presidency in 2017, follow @G7Italy2017 on Twitter and use hashtag #G7Italy2017.
