The SDGs are facing severe global criticism – According to Kishan Khoday, The UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals aim to save the world without transforming it. The UN SDGs are hated by many around the world with fears that global poverty is much more complicated and comprehensive than we ever imagined. A matter that devided the world more than unifying it to face poverty and to offer real and solid hopes for the billions of poor people. Loosers are of course the poor with risks that more and more poor will sink deeper and deeper in larger and larger irreversable poverty traps  (https://undp.unteamworks.org/node/503968), see also the link (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/global-poverty-climate-change-sdgs/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=email_this&utm_source=email).

Gates Foundation, also, rallies the troops to attack UN development goals, Desmond-Hellman gave an overview of the foundation’s “global priorities” within health such as polio eradication, agricultural reform, child and maternal health, better access to financial services for the poor and other programs (http://www.humanosphere.org/world-politics/2015/05/gates-foundation-rallies-the-troops-to-attack-un-development-goals/. 

However, Amina Mohammed, a Nigerian who worked on gender and education targets within the MDG framework and is now the UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon’s adviser on the SDGs tell that “These are complex and difficult problems we are trying to solve”. It’s fine for many to wish the root problems of poverty and inequity could be solved with nice, simple and targeted interventions, Mohammed said. But that is the fantasy position, she said. “The MDGs addressed symptoms, not root causes,” Mohammed said. The SDGs are complex and politically unpalatable to many, she added, precisely because they seek to fix some of the more difficult, politically charged causes of poverty and inequity. “Yes, this is a political agenda,” acknowledged Mohammed, adding that there are many out there who seem to either have “no appetite” for addressing the political causes of inequity or are downright opposed to the SDGs because they represent a threat to the established order and power structure.

If the rich and powerful are divided over how to solve poverty and who is responsible for what and why; who would then help the poor? Would we stand watching the pile-up of poverty to grow and grow and wait for further delay and delay of the poverty peak, i.e. until the twenty second century!