By Own Correspondent

THE Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) has interrogated the factors behind the slow implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in an evaluation which has blamed inefficiencies in the government.

The SDGs are a universal plan for all countries to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. They are a set of 17 goals which include 169 targets.

They provide a focus for the international community’s development efforts until 2030 and are the yardstick by which progress will be measured. They are intended to be tackled as a group rather than individually - the 17 goals are interlinked.

World leaders currently attending the UN General Assembly in New York are expected to take part in a two day SDG Summit which the global body says aims to serve as “a rallying cry to recharge momentum” on reaching those objectives.

In a bid to send a message on the journey travelled so far, Zimbabwe organized the SDGs Exhibition in Harare.

But speaking to The Worker on the event’s sidelines, ZCTU’s head of Parliamentary Affairs and Advocacy Department, Vimbai Zinyama said lack of SDGs focused budget coupled with duplicated government department roles remains the country’s major setbacks.

She said as the country’s leading workers’ organ tracking of progress made under SDG goal 8 on Employment Creation and Economic growth remains a challenge.

“We note that until a National Budget vote is allocated, attainment of the goal will remain a pipedream. Right now there are figures being thrown around but such figures are just descriptive statistics of the state of employment which are not reflecting any strides made towards creating decent work and employment,” she said.

Despite rampant joblessness, the Zimbabwe National Statistics Authority recently placed the country’s unemployment rate at 19,7% based on the strict definition which classifies anyone who performed paid work in the last seven days before the survey as employed regardless of the job being on short time.

“So the government is flying around the Labour Force Survey figures which includes what survivalist workers are doing just to put food on the table. Such data ignores the sustainability of menial jobs and their role in meaningful economic growth as demanded by the SDG goal 8,” said Zinyama.

The ZCTU official said these kinds of jobs are not even contributing meaningfully to the fiscus and do not deserve to be discussed as SDG related.

Apart from labour, Zinyama said on an overall scale government structures and embedded bottlenecks are making it tough for other stakeholders to track progress made if any.

“There is duplication of Ministries work due to bottlenecks and policy overload which is further complicated by secrecy around data sharing.

“We suspect that there is fabrication of facts where we see some government departments falsifying progress made in the attainment of the SDGs. We often hear some departments claiming that they are at 10 or 20% regardless of the fact that such data does not reflect the true position on the ground,” said Zinyama.

She added that lack of a focused budget to support SDGs at a national level further makes the entire effort a talk show.