The Nigerian government and the United Nations are planning to seek alternative capital as the main source of funding for the Sustainable Development Goals in order to implement programmes ahead of the 2030 deadline.

Speaking at the 2-day Joint Steering Committee Meeting of the United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework for Nigeria, the Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, Abubakar Bagudu, said, “2030 is just around the corner, and for the United Nations, as well as for many countries, there is urgency.”

Bagudu noted that there is a need to do more in the very short time that remains for the sustainable development goals to be realised or to be, as much as possible, adding that to address the gap, the federal government must be looking to the private sector alternative funding.

According to the Minister, with a changing world and the UN system facing its own challenges, multilateralism is being strained by a number of global and regional issues, and that these impacts are affecting how they intended the commitments to be delivered.

“In Nigeria, the last three years have been a remarkable effort to reset the economy in such a way that it will be predictability, a more predictable macroeconomic environment that investors can see, and that can begin to release resources that are otherwise spent on subsidies.”

He maintained that “2023-2027 commitments provide opportunities, in Nigeria’s case, the contrasting period has shown a result that we will contribute to sustainable development goals, and we require more resources that are available to governments.”

“But for us, equally, to appreciate that a lot of the goals interrogated carefully, private capital can play a role, and the measures we have taken and the diplomacy we are undertaking are such that we are mobilising private capital in order to complement, and one day actually take the place of pride in the effort to deliver the sustainable development goal.”

He, however, said that the government is confident “that with the support of the United Nations systems, we can generate innovative, creative ideas that can help unlock that flow of private capital that will achieve the scale that is possible.

“We believe that our ambition of the $1 trillion economy that lifts everyone out of poverty by the year 2030 is a unifying theme for everyone here, because even for the United Nations, I think that is a dream that if we achieve it, it will be the most important contributor to the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Also,the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria, Mohamed Malick Fall, lamented the slow pace of progress towards 2030, saying,
“Only four years remain. But in those four years, if you look at today, most of the indicators of the
SDG are either in a process so slow.

Fall said, ” it will not allow us to reach the goal four years from now, or progressing well, and so small that it will not have the multiplying effect and the impact that we have.We all know that in many aspects, Nigeria is following this global trend. We have many goals, and maybe more than half are not on track.”

UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator also urged Nigeria to look beyond the various challenges and climate-related shocks that are absorbing all the gains being made,
saying that the challenges should be seen as a wake-up call for the country to change the way it addresses development.

Similarly, he maintained, “look for domestic resource mobilisation, look for innovative financing, to bring in the private sector, mobilise civil society, to trigger all the mechanisms that can change or adapt to this new paradigm and landscape of resource availability.”

Fall, however, said the current position “should trigger a reflection. And that’s why we think, beyond the guidance we got from the respective ministers who will have spoken, what we expect the steering committee to do is to go down to the data and see where Nigeria stands.

“The progress is so slow, given the size of the population, that if we continue to go at this pace, maybe by 200, 100 years from now, we will still be in this, but we will not be there. Nigeria is being shocked by so many factors, sometimes internal, sometimes external, that you can see that in many aspects, the goals are also experiencing setbacks.”

He argued, “today’s conversation should be on how we are going to address this. The solution is to leverage opportunities provided by private capital, and the whole continent has been almost conquered by the private sector. Nigeria needs speed and scale within the short period remaining.”

Fall therefore said that the two-day workshop should focus on how we can be more efficient in a world where we know that the way we used to get resources is behind us and there is nothing that will change it to bring us into a situation where resources will continue to flow as we described it.