November 5, 2019
Dr. Mari Luomi - Senior Research Fellow, Emirates Diplomatic Academy and Sustainable Development Goals Centre of Excellence for the Arab Region (SDGCAR)
The 22 Arab countries are probably the most diverse region in the world measured by any socioeconomic indicator. The group includes six Least Developed Countries, which have a per capita gross national income of less than a thousand US dollars, and the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries, which are classified as high-income countries. The smallest Arab country, Comoros, has a population of just over 800,000, while Egypt’s population is nearing 100 million.
At the same time, Arab countries share many commonalities, including language, religion, geography and history. While they all are negatively impacted by the same political conflicts and instabilities, numerous mutually-beneficial synergies are created across the region through migration, remittances and development financing. A further common denominator is that all countries in the region are committed to achieving the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within just a little over a decade. So how are they faring?
In a global comparison, many Arab countries are making satisfactory progress on a number of SDGs, most having eradicated extreme poverty (SDG 1) and most being able to provide access to modern energy for all (SDG 7). At the same time, many are still struggling with even the most basic of the goals, such as providing nutritious food (SDG 2) and safe water (SDG 6) for everyone. Even the best performers in the region still have much work ahead with major, transformative tasks such as responsible consumption (SDG 12), environmental performance (SDGs 13-15) and gender and income equality (SDGs 5 and 10).
Examining and working on the SDGs in a regional context is crucial for the success of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as countries have agreed that progress on the SDGs will be followed up and reviewed at the national, regional and global levels. Governments are responsible for providing the data for tracking progress, but in many cases it is not yet readily available. At the same time, the world cannot wait for all data to be available, which is why experts have started developing ways to provide the best possible data available, relying on a variety of high-quality international indicators.
An SDG Index for the Arab Region
The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) has since 2016 published annual indices that track the progress of all countries around the world on the SDGs (available at sdgindex.org). These global indices are useful in showing how far the global community still is from fully achieving the SDGs and where attention is needed the most. They are also good for pinpointing data gaps, which often stem from low statistical capacities that are a major challenge in poorer countries in particular.
At the same time, global comparisons may not contain the most useful or appropriate indicators for measuring SDG achievement in a specific region – the global SDG Index, for example, does not measure the impact of regional violence and conflict on peace, justice and strong institutions (SDG 16) or the energy intensity of economic activity (SDG 7). They also do not allow for maximizing data coverage for a group of countries that has low availability of data on a specific indicator – the Gini coefficient for measuring income distribution (SDG 10) being a good example for the Arab region.
With this in mind, the SDG Centre of Excellence for the Arab Region (SDGCAR), hosted at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi, is working jointly with SDSN to create a regional SDG Index that will support the region’s policymakers and other SDG stakeholders by providing better data coverage and more appropriate ways for the region to measure progress.
The SDG Index for the Arab Region 2019 report, which will be released at the end of the year, will seek to identify challenges that are common for the 22 countries – such as ones rooted in regional instability, for example. The report will also pinpoint remaining data gaps and highlight both major differences and gaps in SDG performance among the countries of the region – job creation and economic growth are likely to feature on this list.
Leveraging Regional SDG Expertise in Support of Implementation
Inputs from experts from across the region have been a key element in the process of developing the regional SDG Index. In May 2019, the SDGCAR held a public expert consultation to obtain suggestions on SDG indicators that would help give a more complete picture of progress and challenges on the road to achieving the SDGs specifically in the Arab countries. The global SDG Index provided a good basis for this, but there are a number of issues important or challenging for this region that the global Index does not currently measure, such as fossil fuel subsidies, income ratio by gender or conflict-related deaths.
Finding new indicators with sufficiently-high coverage for the region’s countries (17 countries as a minimum) proved challenging: there are major gaps in data availability in international datasets, and there is a dearth of regional datasets or databases with SDG-relevant data. Even entire SDGs can be difficult to measure due to low data availability – SDG 10 on reduced inequalities being the most challenging one.
Through the public expert consultation, we received more than 200 individual comments from more than 30 experts. The experts helped us, among other things, in identifying new data sources and indicators with sufficient data coverage, and in finding new ways to measure an SDG target. We also conducted a second, targeted round of expert consultation in which we validated the thresholds for our SDG dashboards: each country receives a traffic light colour for its performance on each indicator and each SDG. For example, a country may receive a green colour on combatting undernourishment (a key dimension under SDG 2 on zero hunger) but it might still receive a red colour on SDG 2 overall due to for example high levels of obesity or unsustainable agricultural practices in the form of inefficient nitrogen and land use. The methodology used in the Arab region index is the same as in all SDG indices developed by the SDSN and its partners. The figures below show the methodology that evaluates trends – another dimension used to measure SDG achievement.
The 4-arrow system for denoting SDG Trends
Sachs, J., Schmidt-Traub, G., Kroll,C., Lafortune, G., Fuller, G. (2019): Sustainable Development Report 2019. New York: Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)
Graphic representation of the SDG Trends methodology
Sachs, J., Schmidt-Traub, G., Kroll, C., Lafortune, G., Fuller, G. (2019): Sustainable Development Report 2019. New York: Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)
The process to develop the first Arab SDG Index is demonstrating the potential of sustainable development expert networks in aggregating topic-specific knowledge into tools that are useful for policymakers and policy stakeholders alike. This is at the very heart of why SDGCAR was established: to serve as a hub for bringing together the often-fragmented expert communities from the various Arab countries to share knowledge and generate policy-relevant research. The SDG Index is a small step on this road, but we hope it will serve to generate discussions between governments and experts, along with other stakeholder groups like businesses and NGOs, on what implementing the SDGs in each Arab country entails and, by doing so, support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda across the region.
For more information about the SDG Index, Dashboards methodology and previously-published reports, please see: https://sdgindex.org/. Previous SDG Indices have been published, inter alia, for the world (since 2016), Africa (since 2018), US cities and states (since 2017 and 2018, respectively), and European cities (2019).
- An earlier version of this article first appeared on The Sustainabilist.
