By Prof John Harbeson
The United Nations-sponsored Sustainable Development Goals were established in 2015 with its clearly articulated overall objective of “leaving no one behind” in the quest to overcome all dimensions of poverty to the maximum extent possible by 2030. The SDG project has been a greatly expanded successor to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with the same objective during the first fifteen years of the new century. In mid-2022, the life of the SDG project is at its midpoint, an appropriate time for a review of the project’s achievements, remaining challenges and prospects for meeting the seventeen over-arching goals and its 169 specific sub- goals. The Africa SDG Index and Dashboards Project 2020 Report summarizes the current results.
The 244 page report offers a very complex analysis of the overall findings, and therein lies the problem that I consider in this brief essay. A downside of the report is that in its complexity and scope, the analysis makes it correspondingly less easily accessible to wade through, even for a well-educated but non-specialized general public. Should not especially the peoples who are to be the beneficiaries of the project have straight-forward ways of grasping how the project may or may not be progressing in their interests from time to time.
The Report’s dashboards do offer capsule scores by country and major goal. Project results are presented by color-coded dots and project trends by color-coded arrows indicating degrees of progress or lack thereof. Overall country scores in the report are quantified based on all 169 variables, but it might also be useful if the dashboard scores that distill those scores based on the overarching seventeen goals, rather than comprehensively on all 169 sub-goals, were also to be expressed quantitatively as well as by color coded dots and arrows in the interests of greater specification and clarity. Below, I attempt to quantify the dashboard scores for Kenya and the other twelve countries the Report classifies as East Africa.
Briefly, the seventeen SDG goals are (1) mitigating poverty-level incomes, (2) ending hunger; (3) establishing good health, (4) quality education, (5)gender equality, (6) clean water and sanitation; (7)providing clean, affordable energy; (8) establishing steady economic growth and good working conditions, (9) industrial innovation and good infrastructure; (10)reducing inequality; (11) establishing sustainable cities and communities, and (12) responsible consumption and production; (13) achieving effective climate adaptation and mitigation, (14) healthy water ways, and (15) sustainable land use; (16) achieving peace, justice and strong institutions and (17) building strong partnerships in pursuit of the foregoing objectives.
The thirteen eastern African countries that are the focus of this essay and their overall 2020 progress scores, (0-100) based on all 169 sub-goals, in addition to Kenya (58.54) include Burundi (50.37), Comoros (46.98), Djibouti (51.30), Eritrea (26.56), Ethiopia (54.15), Rwanda (57.65), Seychelles (no score provided), Somalia (24.64), South Sudan (17.07), Sudan (47.85), Tanzania (57.00) and Uganda (55.71). Kenya ranked 12th among the 52 African countries ranked, Tanzania 17th and Ethiopia 22nd.
These scores might be a useful shorthand, while respecting underlying complexity in some of the same ways that the use of 1-7 scores for civil liberties and political rights, also recognize the underlying complexity, and have proven so useful and so widely used.
For each country, I would propose that the dashboard summaries ofprogress on each of the seventeen overall goals, by country be quantified, in addition to, or in place of, the color and dot-arrow coding, in the following fashion. Where the Report judges the goal has been achieved, a score of 0 would be assigned; where moderate challenges may remain toward reaching the goal (1 point), significant challenges (2 points, or major challenges remain (3 points). The Report also gauges the extent to which efforts are trending toward reaching the goal, i.e., on track toward meeting the goal for which I would assign a score of 0 points, moderate efforts (1 point) stagnating efforts (2 points) and decreasing efforts (3 points). Thus, the best total score would be 0 points, the worst 6 points or a maximum of 102 points for scores of 6 on all 17 goals.
By these measures, Kenya’s overall score for the 17 goals would be 60. Broken down as follows by goal, would be goal one 3 points, goal two 5. goal three 4, goal four 4, goal five 2, goal six 5, goal seven 4, goal eight 2, goal nine 4, the goals ten and twelve (status scores 2 each, no scores for any of the countries on degrees of the efforts, goal eleven 4, goal thirteen 1, goal fourteen 4, goal fifteen 4, goal sixteen 5 and goal seventeen 5. The eastern African region’s country scores would range from 57 to 62.
These scores might be a useful shorthand, while respecting the underlying complexity in some of the same ways that Freedom House’s use of 1-7 scores for civil liberties and political rights, also recognize the considerable underlying complexity, and have proven so useful and so widely employed. Again, more importantly, this shorthand would give the intended beneficiaries of the SDG project a clearer idea about how projects undertaken in their name are doing. (
— Prof Harbeson is a professor of Political Science Emeritus and a professorial lecturer for the African Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University.
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