Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: More efforts are need to successfully implement health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This was stated by speakers at the ‘Stakeholders Consultation on Health related SDGs’, organised by the Sustainable development Policy Institute (SDPI) on Thursday.

“The failure to achieve Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) should be taken as a lesson. We should identify and redress the gaps in implementation so that health services can be improved across Pakistan,” they said.

The consultative meeting was attended by the representatives from relevant government departments, academia, research institutions, think tanks, and NGOs.

Zafarul Islam, the Planning Commission SDGs Unit project director, said that a lack of monitoring mechanisms to measure the progress was one of the major factors behind the failure in successful implementation of MDGs. He said that the government of Pakistan had now developed the networks from provincial to districts and then to grassroots level. “The private sector and think tanks have also been included in the implementation process,” he said.

Dr Babar Tasneem Shaikh, the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination (NHSRC) representative, said that the federal government was providing its support to provinces, especially in terms of expertise to achieve the targets set under health-related SDGs. Shafqat Munir, from SDPI, said that building resilience of communities would be imperative to achieve the desired targets on health related SDGs. He said that it was the only viable option to achieve rest of the global development agenda.

Published in Daily Times, July 14^th , 2017.