High-Level Parliamentary Meetings to Push Forward on New Development Goals

MPs to address in New York the next generation of development goals to succeed MDGs after 2015. ©REUTERS/Stringer

Two important parliamentary meetings will take place in New York next week to push forward on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the new development framework replacing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015.
The MPs will stress the critical role of legislators in making the new global development agenda work, promoting the inclusion of a comprehensive stand-alone goal on democratic governance and the inclusion of a gender perspective in the debate. The role of parliaments in the implementation of the SDGs will also feature strongly on the agenda.
In the annual gathering of the world’s most senior women MPs, the IPU Women Speakers of Parliament Meeting on the 12-13 November, will examine strategies on mainstreaming basic rights for women into all SDGs. Women represent more than half of the world’s population - yet remain by far the most disadvantaged group in all spheres of life. In the political sphere, they represent just 21.4 per cent of all MPs in the world, and just 14.7 per cent of all Speakers of parliament.
The outcome of this meeting will feed into the debate of the Parliamentary Hearing at the United Nations, which takes place immediately after, on 14-15 November.
Jointly organized by IPU and the UN, the meeting brings together more than 100 MPs, including several Speakers of Parliament. It will build on key outcomes of IPU’s 128th Assembly in Quito earlier this year, as well as on high level deliberations at the UN, and will directly channel the views of MPs into the inter-governmental process establishing the new development agenda.
Entitled “Re-thinking sustainable development: the quest for a `transformational’ global agenda in 2015”, the meeting will focus on the need for SDGs to be anchored in an economic model grounded in human well-being as the real purpose of sustainable development.