The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Sustainable Development Goals (SSAP-SDGs) Princess Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire, in a bid to sustainably implement the SDGs in Nigeria has solicited for partnership with the Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (TOSSD) of the UN. The SSAP-SDGs made the overture when she received the UN TOOSD Task Team in her office recently in Abuja.
While briefing the Team on the activities of the office, Princess Adefulire enumerated some of the milestone achievements recorded by the office so far in the implementation of the SDGs in Nigeria. Amongst others, she mentioned the constitution of a committee out-of-school children to work out modalities for taking off the street, a significant number of children in pilots states of Kano, Kaduna, Edo and Ondo.
She said that the establishment of institutional mechanisms such as the Presidential Council on SDGs and National Assembly Committee on SDGs have given a boost to the implementation of SDGs in the country.
In areas of partnership, she hinted that the office is in partnership with all relevant stakeholders including the MDAs, Civil Society Organizations, the Private Sector, Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), National Bureau of Statistics and United Nations Development Program (UNDP)amongst others. The partnership she said, extends to issues of mapping of the existing SDGs related data and establishing baseline data for benchmarking SDGs progress.
The SSAP pointed out that to implement these programs and more, the office has been relying on annual meager budgetary provisions which is grossly inadequate, hence the need for collaboration with TOSSD to be able to secure external funding to achieve the SDGs in Nigeria.
In his remarks, the leader of the TOSSD Task Force Team, Guillaume Delalande said the mission of its visit to Nigeria is to track all resources provided through official and multilateral institutions, assess how transparently the resources are put to use and monitor development.
He added that, the objective is to carry out right assessment of Nigeria’s capacity to access, collate, analyze and use data on external official finance in support of Sustainable Development. He promised to forward to the TOSSD Management the collaboration and funding request made by the SSAP for further action.
