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. Le… - Amina J. Mohammed

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.

First of all, I think that any population should be seen from the perspective of being an asset to a country and we need to make the investment to make sure there is quality and that everyone has equal opportunity. Today we have populations growing without the ability to service them and therefore, women and children take the brunt of this and are suffering. We have to go back to those policies and see why that is happening. In many cases, it’s because we don’t have the choices around population issues to make those decisions and I think that’s what we should be given, the free choice to make the decisions we need to, to have a healthy family.

First of all, I think Africa is trying to make those strides that are necessary to achieving SDG 5 (Gender Equality). But the approach to development in Africa has always been ad hoc, and I think we have been pitting some of our greatest challenges against each other in terms of making choices. For example, we will say, Well we have to make a choice between a woman and health. Or a woman and an education budget. And I think this is where we have got it wrong. The fact is that women are an integral part of any investment, be it in health, in education, in agriculture, etc. Africa needs to recognize that our human resources are the biggest asset base that we have, and to ignore investing in 50% of it, is just foolhardy and affects results, as well as the rights that women have in their lives.