By Own Correspondent

THE Tripartite Negotiation Forum (TNF) is consistently tracking the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) amid concerns that the platform is paying more attention towards broad policy issues, a recent SDGs country status report by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has revealed.

The SDGs monitor said that despite the Labour Ministry being mandated to deal with the coordination of Agenda 2030, lack of capacity and consistent monitoring remains a huge setback.

The Agenda 2030 houses the National Development Strategy1 (NDS1) which aims to address the SDGs targets.

"The national Tripartite Negotiating Forum does not discuss the SDGs as such and is only involved in policy development rather than implementation and monitoring.

“The government of Zimbabwe has integrated the SDGs into its 2021-2025 National Development Strategy (NDS1), which aims to realise the country’s Vision 2030 and Africa Agenda 2063. All SDGs are integrated into the 14 national priorities of the NDS1, with clear targets and indicators to monitor progress,” the report observed.

The ITUC says at the tripartite dialogues, labour has raised critical issues which include wages and prices, labour law reform, productivity, national social security and corruption, but said unfortunately, no concrete results have come out of these negotiations.

“Trade unions warn that not enough resources have been allocated to the implementation of Agenda 2030. They attribute this to a lack of concrete efforts on cutting back on non-productive recurrent expenditures to create fiscal space; corruption and rent-seeking behaviour; failure to plug loopholes and eliminate leakages and illicit financial flows; and the slow pace of reform of state enterprises providing social services,” the ITUC said.

The global labour bloc bemoaned that the multi-stakeholder platform to consult civil society on the implementation of the SDGs still meets only on an ad hoc basis.

“Although for the first time the NDS1 has a clear recognition of the role of decent work in the COVID-19 recovery period, there are doubts around the political will to implement this strategy in the current context, as the government has failed on its commitments with all its economic frameworks and has resorted to austerity,” said ITUC.