Devex: With sights set firmly on SDGs, let’s push for wider adoption of best practices
Albina du Boisrouvray, founder and president emerita of FXB

“…Wider knowledge sharing in the humanitarian community is a must, if we want to speed up the process of lifting millions of people from extreme poverty. There is no time to waste in helping large organizations do a better job of learning from smaller, more nimble NGOs. Yet large government programs continue to function in a clustered fashion. The result is that the biggest sums of money available to fight poverty are sometimes spent the least effectively. The good news is we may have reached the ‘tipping point’ in the fight against poverty. … With our sights set firmly on the targets of the sustainable development goals, let’s get to work pushing for the faster, wider adoption of the best practices developed by NGOs. If we succeed, we stand a real chance of tipping the scales in the fight against extreme poverty around the globe” (7/7).

The Guardian: New development goals need to be ambitious, actionable, and accountable
Jonathan Glennie, director of policy and research at Save the Children

“…I am broadly an SDG fan, because I hope it will do something similar [to the broad vision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights]. Having said that, there is no doubt that it is actions that matter, not just words. We need to set the SDG negotiators, and the governments they work for, a ‘triple A challenge’: the SDG agenda needs to be ambitious, actionable, and accountable. Ambition will not be a problem. It is the other two As we need to work on. … The SDG agenda is … visionary and inspiring. As the long process of drawing up the next set of global goals reaches its final straight, its ambition is assured. It is time to turn our attention to action and accountability in the hope of giving the whole process a triple A rating” (7/8).

Inter Press Service: Opinion: SDGs, FfD and Every Single Dollar in the World
Paul Ladd, UNDP director for the post-2015 team, and Pedro Conceicao, UNDP chief of profession of strategic policy

“…One of the most-asked questions is: How much will it cost us to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? … So the answer to the question ‘How much money will it take to achieve the new SDGs?’ is … drum-roll … every single dollar in the world. … For instance, advancing gender equality would directly advance the SDGs and generate economic benefits. … Donors should indeed meet their 0.7 percent commitments and make much faster progress on their commitments on improving how aid is done. … [I]f the [Financing for Development (FfD) Conference] in Addis Ababa, scheduled to take place next week, only focuses on mobilizing more money and doesn’t do something about improving how that money is spent, then we will have missed the point, and will certainly miss the grand targets we have set for ourselves. This is why every dollar counts” (7/7).

Nature: Policy: Development goals should enable decision-making
Keith Shepherd, leader of the science domain on land health decisions at the World Agroforestry Centre, and co-authors

“…Target-setting is trendy among aid and development organizations as well as in multilateral agreements for accountability, impact and value for money. We contend that target-setting is flawed, costly and could have little — or even negative — impact. … We advocate a different approach. Governments and the development community need to embrace decision-analysis concepts and tools that have been used for decades in mining, oil, cybersecurity, insurance, environmental policy and drug development. Our call to adopt this approach is based on five principles. Replace targets with measures of investment return. … Model intervention decisions. … Integrate expert knowledge. … Include uncertainty in predictive models. … Measure the most informative variables. … We call on the delegates of the Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa to establish a task force to explore our approach…” (7/8).