Government is to launch the Accra Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) investment fair to raise funds to finance the SDGs.
The Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta who disclosed this during the launch of the 2018 SDGs Budget Baseline Report in Accra on Wednesday, said the fair which would be held before the end of the year, would be a vibrant and new market place for SDG investment.
“The fair, will provide opportunities for local and global partnerships on financing SDGs in Ghana,” he said.
Ghana is the second country, apart from Mexico to have launched a baseline report on the SDGs.
Ghana in 2015 signed on to the SDGs, which is a successor to the Millennium Development Goals, with 17 goals and 169 ambitious sets of targets, among others, is aimed at ending poverty and hunger and combating climate change and improving access to health and education.
The minister, who launched the SDGs Baseline Report, averred that the attainment of the SDGs, would largely, depend on the support of the private sector, civil society and other critical stakeholders.
To this end, Mr Ofori-Atta entreated the private sector to provide financial support to government to fund programmes under the SDGs and civil society to lend their support to the government to achieve the goals of the SDGs.
He also said effective collaboration among state agencies and institutions would go a long way to help the country to achieve the SDGs.
Mr Ofori-Atta said President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who co-chairs the United Nations advocacy group for the SDGs, and was committed to mainstreaming the SDGs with Ghana’s policies and programmes and developing a national structure and methodology for financing the SDGs.
He said the One District, One Factory, the One Village, One Dam, Nation Builders Corps and the Planning for Food and Jobs initiatives were aligned with the SDGs.
Touching on the SDG Baseline Report, Mr Ofori-Atta said the report was to help track government allocation and spending on SDGs, where financial resources for tracking the SDGs were coming from and which ministry or agency and SDG project funds had been allocated to.
The SDG Budget Baseline Report was based on a comprehensive analysis of how the coding of the policy objective segment of the Chart of Account could better track SDG budget allocations, adding that, “We have re-coded the policy objective segment of the chart of accounts and populated it with the SDG targets to help us track both allocations and actual spending on our policy objectives and their matching SDG targets.”
He said the new coding system would help to ensure that the country’s investments were in line with the SDGs, pointing out that Ghana was taking the lead in developing a national structure and methodology for tracking budget within the SDG’s framework.
The Special Advisor to the President on the SDGs, Dr Eugene Owusu said SDGs would be attained on the back of private sector financing, innovating financing, data, the youth and unleashing the potential of women.
By Kingsley Asare
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