Dignity for all

In the beginning, Jane Njaguara – a farmer in Kenya – had a single goat. By the time I met her, she had poultry, cows, and a thriving milling business. Not only could she send her children to school, she was also employing others in the community. In other words, to echo the theme of this book, Jane had fetched her bucket of water.

Undoubtedly, many factors contributed to Jane's achievements, including her membership of a dairy group supported by an IFAD-supported project. But a development project can only provide opportunity; it is only a drop in the bucket. I suspect the reason for Jane's success had as much to do with an inner drive to provide a better life for her family.

In my career as both a scientist and an administrator, I have learned to track success through objective indicators. But I have also found that to understand results we must go beyond what can be measured in a test tube or plotted on a spreadsheet. In the end, development is about what really matters to people. It's about empowering them to take greater control of their lives, against all the odds that may be stacked against them.

Sometimes a project's success can be measured against tangible factors. For me, however, the most important outcomes are often intangible, such as the pride of a mother who can send her children to school well-fed and well-nourished, perhaps for the first time. When I am privileged to witness such a moment in people's lives I know that real change is possible.

On paper, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a blueprint for ending hunger and undernutrition, as well as tackling poverty, inequality, and the impact of climate change (UN General Assembly, 2015b). There are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and 169 targets, indicators, and means of implementation. The Agenda also commits signatories to a 'robust, voluntary, effective, participatory, transparent and integrated follow-up and review framework' to ensure implementation over the next 15 years.

This level of rhetoric is necessary for such a sweeping and ambitious agreement. A detailed list of targets and indicators is also critical to keep us all on track and to help measure outcomes. Yet I do not want to lose sight of what's truly important about the SDGs.

Development is a measurable process aimed at delivering immeasurable goods – improvement in collective and individual well-being and a safer, fairer, and sustainable world. At its heart, then, the 2030 Agenda is about restoring and strengthening hope and dignity for people struggling to make better lives for themselves and their families.

Can such an ambitious agenda be achieved? My answer is: why not?

The international community achieved the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) – to halve the poverty rate – five years ahead of schedule (UN, 2015). There are now more than 100 middle-income countries, as diverse as Brazil, Lesotho, and Vanuatu (World Bank n.d. a). Globally, 1.8 billion people are middle class, a number that could increase to 3.2 billion by 2020 and 4.9 billion by 2030 (Kharas, 2010). And in the last 15 years, the proportion of undernourished people in the developing world has fallen by almost half (FAO et al., 2015).

The 2030 Agenda and the SDGs reflect a growing consensus on development priorities, and signal the international community's desire to solve the world's problems. It is significant that this agenda was developed and agreed in a consultative process among the world's governments and ratified by world leaders. But the time has come to go beyond speeches and declarations, meetings and reports, and expression of commitments.

While we applaud the universal nature of the Agenda and the consultative process behind it, it is also important to recognize continuity with previous development efforts. We must be aware of the issues that have blocked their implementation so we can anticipate and, if possible, avoid similar problems. It is now more than ten years since the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness called for greater country ownership, harmonization, and accountability. Much progress has been made towards these goals, even as the direction of official development assistance (ODA) has become more uncertain. The 2030 Agenda will require even more attention to harmonization, and in addition to being owned by countries, implementation will have to involve the very people we are trying to help. This is what people-centred development means.

At the same time, the growing role of private foundations, more public–private partnerships, South–South and triangular cooperation, and the potential to leverage billions of dollars in remittances for development, are all changing the way we think about development. Everywhere there is an intensifying focus on demonstrating impact and results, and showing value for money in development spending.

Far more than the MDGs, the 2030 Agenda is an ambitious agenda: it aims to eradicate poverty and hunger, to leave no one behind, and to put all economies and societies on a sustainable path. It is also comprehensive, spanning social, environmental, and economic issues, as well as issues related to governance and means of implementation. Finally, it is an integrated agenda, with progress on any goal requiring concurrent and coherent action around others.

We know what to do. We know what works and what doesn't work. What we now need is sustained, evidence-based action. The 2030 Agenda has raised the bar in terms of the ambitions of development; but the expectations have been raised as well. We will be held accountable for delivering tangible and verifiable results.

The importance of rural transformation

The 2030 Agenda is achievable if we recognize the multi-faceted and interconnected nature of the challenges.

Our world is full of paradoxes, some of them grotesque. Amid rising affluence in our world, there is also growing inequality. In 2015, some 836 million people still lived in poverty (UN, 2015), and 795 million people remained chronically undernourished (FAO et al., 2015). While these hundreds of millions go to bed hungry each night, a third of all food is lost or wasted (FAO, 2011a). The three-quarters of the world's poor who live in rural areas are responsible for up to 80 per cent of the food produced in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia (IFAD, 2016c), yet many must buy food for their own table (Christiaensen and Demery, 2007).

It is a terrible irony that so many who produce food for others must buy it for themselves. But more than that, it is a travesty because smallholders are penalized at both ends. Lack of access to markets, poor infrastructure, and other causes often prevent smallholder farmers from benefiting from higher food prices. At the same time, they must pay...