Amina J. Mohammed Quotes

Yes. In the context of many of our countries that are experiencing different types of conflict and humanitarian challenges, it’s difficult to address some of these goals.

Then you hear what’s going on in South Africa with AI, and you’re thinking, ‘okay, what is the transition going to look like? How do we build that capacity? How do we look at the financial architecture, which was really built for another era, and not for our development – [what about] access courses or even profiting from the natural resources that we have, so that we can build?’ And so it’s going to be complex, because we are many, and our issues are very complex.

And that’s what really draws me to the Arch [Desmond Tutu]. Because I think he really taught us how to respect what’s behind our skin. It’s us, it’s human beings. And as you’re born, you’re incredibly free of everything, and depending where you land, is what shapes you.

The response to that is so complicated; it’s not a neat number, it’s not a neat set of targets. I think that, first, we should acknowledge that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were a really good effort. It was the first time the world came together to set a number of integrated issues together. We might not have achieved all of them everywhere but we knew that it did work and therefore, what we did was take it a step further.

And then the livelihoods of all these Maasai women and men that I met, their livelihoods, their cattle have died. You see the carcasses on the road. And we don’t want to talk about that much. But that’s assets that have just been taken away. And so when Kenya is dealing with that, they’re saying, ‘okay, right now, the private sector is coming in, and we’re asking them to put a fund together, so they buy the cattle before they die’. So there are resources for that community, for the hard times, and they can replenish stock. Then we have put things together that will help us to build back with a level of resilience.

And what the SDGs tell us is: Let’s take a step back and let’s ask people to set the foundations on which we are building sustainable development. Let’s get them right; let’s take the time to do that and not be in a hurry to fail.

I listened to an elder just three days ago, and his eyesight had gone. And all he said was ‘we’re very grateful for what you’ve been able to give us here, but there’s a lot of people you can’t see that haven’t been able to get to this’. And the first thing he said was women and people with disabilities. And it just made me think, ‘wow, this person right now is not talking about can we have more for me and my tribe’, which is what generally gets into a story, he’s been very specific about the people that are being left behind, that we don’t see.

Everybody’s got a closet, and some worse than others. But if that person takes a good message that does no harm, that brings people together, that forwards Africa, we need to find that community.

And I think that we are richer for it if we identify with what we really are. The question of diversity for me is far deeper than the narrow, silo approach that we are seeing on diversity now.

We don’t often look at the fact that root causes can require to be addressed over the long-term. We have to have a balance on what we do in the short term; what can we do in the long-term, and there are some of those low-hanging fruit that give a sense of the possibilities of achieving the longterm objective. But people often want to have things done yesterday.