By Jerome Onoja Okojokwu-Idu

Sustainability experts have urged stakeholders driving sustainable development in local communities in the Global South to focus on capacity-building partnerships with indigenes and strengthening collaboration with the Global North through technology utilisation.

At the May 2022 edition of the EnvironFocus monthly webinar which was focused on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 17, experts noted that understanding and scrutinising global governance processes and partnerships were of crucial importance as transnational activity keeps expanding. SDG 17 according to the UN consists of financial, technological and political targets aimed at driving development with improved trade, increasing knowledge sharing and cooperation for access to science, technology and innovation, and enhancing multilateral cooperation between the Global North and South. The EW Series is held by EnvironFocus every month to provide the attendees with sustainability-focused learning from a global perspective.

The first speaker Bruce Taylor, founder of Enviro-Stewards and renowned expert with accolades in pollution prevention from Canada and the United States, focused his speech on capacity-building partnerships between the North and South for SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation. Taylor cited how his experience in building the Safe Water and Social Venture Project that empowered communities in South Sudan and Uganda changed his approach towards partnerships aimed at aiding communities. He stated that the conventional nature of those partnerships risked undermining local capacities and could worsen the problem in some cases.
He suggested that partners should try to ask strategic questions: “How do you work with local capacity, rather than wiping it out and replacing it?” According to Taylor, a listening first approach coupled with humility and mutual respect was critical to driving lasting change.

He also said, “Our tagline is ‘Engineering Change’ and engineering is the easy part. If I want change, I need the sanitation supervisor, maintenance manager, quality manager, and line operators, to agree that we are going to change in a certain way.

“If you want to have a bigger impact, you need to bring everybody else on board. That is where partnering for the Goals comes in.”
On his part, Dr Mofoluso Fagbeja, who is the Assistant Director and Head of the Space Education Outreach Programme Division at the UN-Affiliated African Regional Center for Space Science and Technology Education in English spoke on capacity building partnerships between the Global North and South for SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, during his presentation “Partnerships for Data and Technology Integration into SDG Implementation in Developing Countries.” Fagbejo noted the need for improvement in technological availability as he said that barriers such as lack of access to internet and connectivity, data capacity, and underdeveloped technological infrastructure in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) hampered North-South partnerships.

According to him, the progress of LMICs on SDGs would be severely impeded without efficient data and technological capacities and infrastructure. He highlighted some of the capacities that indigenous and innovative technologies would be critical for manufacturing, access to broadband, energy efficiency achievement, building resilient and sustainable cities, and tracking and managing environmental degradation. Others listed were: Building early warning systems for climate-induced disaster risk reduction; optimal use of available land for agriculture to attain food security; managing infectious diseases and epidemics, and managing demographic dynamics.
Fagbeja said: “The existing North-South partnerships on data and technology utilization have not adequately addressed issues of local independence in the continuity of data generation, collection, and advanced analysis required to meet the SDGs in LMICs.

“Developing countries are not actually able to participate in carbon credit schemes because they do not have the requisite knowledge to estimate their carbon footprints, to begin with.”