2020 is the decade of action, and it has to be a sprint

Happy New Year, Kenya. 2020 marks a decade of action towards the realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

Peace and development are inextricably linked, with each making the achievement of the other far more likely. This puts the conflict-prevention and development work of the UN at the heart of the agenda in East Africa, but in a multi-agency and programme environment, making meaningful progress is challenging.

Aware of this, the UN began a process of structural reforms led by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres who made them- the reforms a priority at the very beginning of his term in January 2017.

The aim being to deliver better results through cooperation, collaboration and integration.

2019 was the year that the impact of these reforms became real and nowhere more than in the peace, conflict-prevention and development pillars of the UN’s work.

At the country level, that shift towards a nimble, 21st century UN challenges deeply entrenched practices and operations.

In a country team with over 23 individual agencies, funds and programmes, the reform process can be complicated, even messy.

Cross-border challenges

To the credit of the Kenya country team, we overcame the challenges of ceding long-held agency interests for the collective good and achieved some ground-breaking milestones in our partnership with governments, civic organisations and the private sector.

The most outstanding was our venturing out to confront challenges that transcend borders. East Africa faces major threats to peace and development across multiple fronts, and respective UN country teams have, in a remarkable show of teamwork, sought to harmonise their responses to these threats.

Internecine border conflicts and the effects of climate change together make a formidable challenge that saw together UN teams from Kenya and Uganda form a pact that seeks to bring sustainable development to the Karamoja triangle.

This pact follows another successful regional collaboration project on the the Kenya-Ethiopia border where communities accustomed to recurrent hostilities are now reaching out to each other to find solutions to common socio-economic challenges.

We believe that our regional surge towards prevention, peacemaking and diplomacy will have a particular impact on the youth, who suffer an enduring sense of being neglected and ignored, something that has created a breeding ground for extremism and radicalisation.

Addressing such concerns was a key point of deliberation during last July’s African Regional High-Level Conference on Counter-Terrorism and the Prevention of Violent Extremism in Nairobi.

The same regional approach was behind the initiative by Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Somalia to sign the Declaration and Action Plan to End Cross-border FGM in  April 2019. This was the first time multiple countries had come together to tackle this pernicious cross-border crime.

But there remain many in the region still left behind by development, and we continue to stand up for them through our UN Development Assistance Framework 2018-2022.  

The framework’s gender equality and rights focus is unmistakable, because in many communities, the simple fact of being born female shatters one's chances of living in full human dignity. 

Our focus on giving a leg-up to those left farthest behind has attracted a positive response from our partners in national and county governments.  By staying in lockstep with national priorities on issues such as health, agriculture and housing, the common thread of messages from our partners is that we are staying effective and responsive to the ambitions of Kenyans.

Big Four agenda

As 2020 beckons, the decade of action starts and it has to be a sprint to deliver on the SDGs, the UN team in Kenya is rolling up its sleeves with greater urgency, ambition and innovation. We will enhance regional cooperation and private-public partnerships as we work with the Government towards lifting millions of the citizens of this region out of poverty and upholding their human rights.

We are re-imagining ways of delivering development in ways such as the co-creation of an SDG innovation lab between the Government of Kenya,  the Centre for Effective Global Action at the University of California in Berkeley, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the UN.  The SDG Lab will kick off with support for the delivery of Kenya’s Big Four agenda by harnessing, big data, technology and innovation to achieve scale and impact.

As a UN country team, we got off the blocks in 2019 in pursuit of UN Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed’s challenge to “flip the orthodoxy” for the repositioning of the UN.  We have dared to go beyond the typical and will do whatever it takes to respond effectively to the challenges faced by Kenya’s people, now and in the future.

Siddharth Chatterjee is  the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Kenya.