Oyo govt partners UI, NISER on implementing SDGs

Poised to ensure the realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Oyo state government has entered a partnership with the University of Ibadan, Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER) among other stakeholders.

The partnership, according to Special Adviser on Economic Affairs to Governor Makinde, Dr Musbau Babatunde and Senior Special Assistant on SDGs, Kunle Yusuff, will be leveraging on research and statistics to track the state’s progress in the implementation of SDGs.

Babatunde and Yusuff made this known in their various remarks at a Stakeholders’ Meeting on the Institutionalisation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), held at the Head of Service Conference Room, Secretariat, Agodi, Ibadan, on Thursday.

Speaking, Babatunde said the implementation of the SDGs was in tandem with the administration’s agenda of expanding the economy, security, health and education.

He particularly added that the partnership will bring about an institutional framework that will be used to implement all the goals across the different strata of the state.

To implement government’s programmes in line with the SDGs, he added that the state government will engage development partners that have shown great willingness to assist the state.

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“We are going to make sure that we design physical projects, programmes and activities that we can review every quarter everything we are doing on the implementation. “We are going to take holistic baseline analysis in terms of getting the survey and the data that can actually tell us the direction in which we are making progress and where we need to brace up.

“Given the fact that research and statistics will have a great role to play in the achievement of the SDGs, we are partnering with the University of Ibadan, and NISER. By this, we are leveraging on the number of statistics that the Bureau of Statistics for the state can actually give to us in order to be able to track our development in terms of moving the SDGs forward and making it highly implementable.

“NISER AND the University of Ibadan, are to come together, brainstorm and formulate a framework to institutionalise ISDG, which is Integrated Sustainable Development Goals.

“We are now actually taking all the goals that are related to Governor Makinde’s administration and try to come together to look at how we can institutionalise the achievements in a particular manner that can actually take the pacesetter state that is actually known for, in respect to economy, education, healthcare services, adequate protection of lives and property.

“Taking people from poverty to prosperity is a holistic view. It is not something that Oyo State will do alone. This is where development partners come in. For some of the programmes, we only need to provide counterpart funding, and the other development partner should bring other counterpart funding, which is quite huge and which this administration will take advantage of.

“So, irrespective of the financial situation of Oyo State now, the development partners have shown great willingness to assist the state with respect to some of these programmes and this particular project.

“It is not going to be white elephant projects. They are things that will improve the qualities of lives to improve the welfare of the populace such that we are taking governance to the street to meet the people,” Babatunde said.

Also speaking, Yusuff avowed that the development initiatives and welfarist approach of Governor Seyi Makinde to governance were already attracting the attention of development partners.

To this end, he said the state was poised to migrate from poverty to prosperity.

“Oyo State has two things working for us right now, the governance of inclusion and integrity. When a government has integrity and it is carrying everybody along, that is a good scorecard with the United Nations.

“Presently, the Federal Government and everybody sees Oyo State as a pilot society, they refer to us now as a welfarist state, where everybody is being carried along on all the subject-matters of development. The administration has been working hard to make sure Sustainable Development Goals are achieved in the state,” Yusuf said.