​Speakers

Elizabeth Stuart, Research Fellow, ODI

Jose Manuel Roche, Head of Research, Save the Children

Debapriya Bhattacharya, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) and Chair, Southern Voice on Post-MDG International Development Goals

Minh-Thu Pham, Policy Director at UNF

Chair

Peter van der Vliet, Dutch Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN

​The Leave No One Behind event hosted at the UN in New York brought together UN negotiators, civil society and other stakeholders to discuss concrete proposals for leaving no one behind and seriously tackling inequality. It was chaired by Peter van der Vliet, Dutch Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN.

The Permanent Secretary of Tanzania of the Ministry of community Development, Gender and Children began the talk by celebrating the significant progress in development that have been made in Tanzania in areas such as education, including the remarkable achievements that have been made in primary education, with almost one girl to one boy completing primary school. She identified limitations of services and data as they are not sufficient enough to know who and where the most marginalized are – which is essential in leaving no one behind.

The DPR of Mexico added how Mexico consistently advocated for the notion of inclusiveness in the SDGS, including targets that need to be achieved by all social groups, especially those left further behind – such as women and girls, indigenous people, migrants, people with disabilities, rural people and so on. They are very important as they cross cut across all SDGs.

Elizabeth Stuart, Research Fellow at ODI went on to speak of the broad agreement around what ‘leave no one behind’ means. The term has been cited in number of official reports and is likely to be in the Summit declaration and in zero draft of FFD.

She suggested 3 ways to see this concretely in an outcome document:

1. By 2019 (3 years) – Governments should undertake identification exercise. Who are marginalized groups within countries?

2. There should be a major international summit on ‘leave no one behind’ as of 2013 with common learnings.

3. Need for improvement of data and making it open access so everyone can monitor.

Jose Manuel Roche, Head of Research at Save the Children began by defining progress as:

1. Rapid average progress.

2. No target met unless met for all social and economic groups

3. Disadvantaged groups ‘catch up’ and close gaps with other groups

He gave the example of child survival; the majority of the countries that didn’t leave children behind were actually achieving a faster progress by 6%, disproving the belief that reaching poorest is harder.

Debapriya Bhattacharya, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) and Chair, Southern Voice on Post-MDG International Development Goals commented that all inequalities mentioned so far applied within countries, not between them, therefore the issues are only partially covered. A universal agenda is needed to focus between countries and leaving no one behind and this is the core issue.

Minh-Thu Pham, Policy Director at UNF closed the talk by considering how we highlight the gaps between those being left behind and address them - for example gender, data and age related issues - and the need to highlight challenges for the vulnerable.