The United Nations Association of Tanzania (Co-convener of Tanzania Sustainable Development Platform has begun processes for the 2023 Voluntary National Review (VNR) to track Tanzania’s progress in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Tanzania Sustainable Development Platform (TSDP) successfully coordinated the contributions of CSOs and ensured that the efforts were documented and integrated in the voluntary national review (VNR) in 2019. In March 2022, the Ministry of Finance and Planning informed the TSDP about the government’s intentions to contribute to the SDG Summit at the 2023 High Level Political Forum (HLPF) and redirected the responsibility for coordinating the efforts of civil society organizations to the United Nations Associations and its Platform for the Sustainable Development Goals.
The 2023 HLPF will address the theme, ”Accelerating the recovery from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and the full implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at all levels.” Furthermore, the SDG Summit 2023 will focus particularly on in-depth analyses of the SDGs number 6, (clean water and sanitation), 7 (affordable and clean energy), 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure), 11 (sustainable cities and communities), and 17 (partnerships for the Goals).
Tanzania Sustainable Development Platform (Co-Convened by UNA Tanzania), is responsible for coordinating CSOs in the implementation, monitoring, and reporting of Sustainable Development Goals. Specifically, the Platform seeks to document civil society organizations’ contributions to the implementation, follow up and monitoring of Sustainable Development in Tanzania, and facilitate sharing knowledge, experiences, best practices, and innovations emerging from civil society organizations.
Multi-stakeholder engagement is important to ensure CSO involvement in providing policy recommendations, implementation, monitoring and reporting on the SDGs. Reaching out to many different stakeholders working with different target groups and thematic areas is also important in working towards inclusion and to leave no one behind.
On this occasion, the Platform organized a two days multi-stakeholder workshop in Dar Es Salaam with the aim to jointly develop commitments on mobilizing resources, improve tools and reporting formats for consultation and reporting on VNR consultations and reporting from CSOs on the CSO Voluntary National Review 2022/2023. A total of 50 representatives from different civil society organizations participated in the event.
The event consisted of presentations, focus group discussions and plenary discussion. The presentations mainly focused on the country’s VNR preparatory current state, national VNR roadmap and 2019 CSOs VNR background, the structure of 2019 VNR report and 2019 data collection template. The focus group discussions led to important insights on what improvements need to be made to both the data collection template and the VNR CSO reporting structure from 2019. During the plenary discussions, speakers from the Tanzania Sustainable Development Platform, the Ministry of Finance and Planning, and other representatives responded to questions, opinions and concerns raised by participants.
The event was very important in setting the structure for civil society organization of the outcomes of the SDGs in the forthcoming 2023 VNR report
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