The frontline Civil Society Organizations, (CSOs) working around the Sustainable Development Goals, (SDGs) have described as commendable ongoing stakeholders consultative workshops on the Voluntary Local Review exercise.
In an interview with www newspanorama.com.ng, a representative of Christian Aid, Mr. David Gabriel said co-creating a document leads to taking ownership of the document.
“This is commendable, and one of the things we are doing as an organization, (Christian Aid), we preach this component of co-creating documents, such is what’s happening today, reviewing what the state had been doing around SDGs since it started implementing it and the review was not done independently but co-creatively and different stakeholders were engaged. In the end, what would come out of the document will be rich and every stakeholder would take ownership”.
Mr. David called on other sectors that have been identified not to be doing better to open up to the CSOs for more civic engagement.
“You can see from the engagement some sectors are performing better than others and what could probably be playing out was the fact that the level of openness in those sectors doing much more is that they have better civil engagement space”.
On her part, the Program Manager of the Center for Water and Environment Development, Doris Zakama the CSOs are closer to the communities, hence can explain the 17 SDGs better to fast-track development.
To further close the gap, Zakama added, “we need to be having this kind of engagement at least quarterly that would give us rapid development “.
Also, speaking the co-chair of the Kaduna Basic Education Accountability Mechanism, (KADBAM) said the essence of the exercise is aimed to assess Kaduna State’s performance on SDGs implementation.
“The good thing about the engagement is that government is fast realizing the relevance of non-state actors in the project and program design planning, and implementation”.
He commended the Planning and Budget Commission for its strategic planning to engage different stakeholders on different dates so that at the end of the day data collected would be seamlessly analyzed for development.
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