Anne and Handley Stevens’s daughter Lucy has written to let us know that
“By the time you read this, something momentous will have happened.
On 27th September in New York, the General Assembly of the United Nations will have adopted a new set of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ meant to guide us towards a better, more equitable, more environmentally friendly planet by 2030.
The set of 17 goals are ambitious, and from a poverty-reduction perspective they have aspirations which should be applauded: eliminating hunger and extreme poverty, ensuring access for everyone to the basics of life. This is a step forward from the ‘Millennium Development Goals’ that preceded them. But sometimes these high-level commitments can feel a million miles away from the lives of poor people worried about what they will eat today, how they can earn some money, or whether the herds will survive the latest dry spell.
Practical Action works hard to improve the lives of poor people in very practical ways: whether it is helping to bring proper sanitation to slum dwellers in Bangladesh, or off-grid electricity to power lighting, clinics, and irrigation for rural communities in Zimbabwe, or building the resilience of people at risk of flooding. We use the technologies and approaches that work and are sustainable, in partnership with and led by the needs of communities on the ground.
Together with other like-minded organisations we pushed to make sure, for example, that access to clean energy was included in the list of new goals, and that the role of cities was properly recognised in our increasingly urbanising world. Moreover, whatever is signed up to, the way it is implemented is crucial. Our founder E.F. Schumacher realised that not all
‘development’ was good development, and so it will be with the SDGs. In the rush to ensure ‘energy access for all’, governments may spend billions on new power stations and extending the grid, while not prioritising the needs of those who will never be reached in this way. In the rush towards ‘safely managed’ sanitation too much may be spent on expensive sewerage treatment plants benefitting the minority already connected to the sewer network, and excluding slum-dwellers sharing unsafe pit latrines with dozens of other families.
We will use our real life examples, experience, and life-transforming project work to try to ensure that many others can benefit, and take a step closer to the goals we have now collectively set”.
Practical Action
Lucy Stevens