Editorial: Poverty alleviation; Cameroon running out of time!.

The calibre of members in the Prime Minister's entourage, which included the Minister of External Relations, Mbella Mbella; Minister of Environment, Nature Protection and Sustainability Development, Hele Pierre; Minister of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development, Alamine Ousmane Mey, among others, illustrated the importance of the issues to Cameroon.

In a context of growing geopolitical crises, the summit had one of the goals of uniting policymakers and business leaders to accelerate development.

It was to steer momentum with a systemic approach to answer questions such as: How can value chains become climate-friendly and create more value for emerging societies and developing countries? How can the enormous potential of the private sector be unleashed to achieve the development goals? And how can today's sustainability pioneers set tomorrow's standards?

As the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, has said, development goals “...are in great difficulty," and need a rescue plan to save humanity and the planet.

The Hamburg Sustainability Conference was driven by the vision that reaching the development goals requires interdisciplinary and trustful collaboration among the international community.

Opening the summit, German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, drew the attention of the international community on the need to act wisely and fast. This, Scholz noted, was in order to save a world increasingly threatened by the climate, war and poverty.

The German Chancellor used the confab to propose measures to help accelerate solutions to challenges facing the globe.

Scholz mentioned the implementation of social transformation, which she said, leaves no one behind, taking into account UN Agenda 2030, the setting up of a circular economy and serious ecological transformation. He expressed compassion to victims of hurricane and floods around the world, especially those in West and Central Africa, where many are left in dire conditions.

The German Chancellor also called on world leaders to invest in sustainable development.

As a member of the United Nations Organisation, Cameroon joined the rest of its members to adopt the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2015.

Following the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations, the Cameroon government developed the Growth and Employment Strategic Paper, GESP, based on the SDGs and another which contained Cameroon’s vision by 2035, the National Development Strategy 2020-2030. 

The GESP set as objective to ameliorate the population's access to drinking water by 75% in 2019 and to improve sanitary systems by 60% by 2035. These to be achieved by rehabilitating existing infrastructures, completing extensions to existing potable water networks and promoting the implementation of large-scale connection programmes.

According to independent data, the access rate to drinking water as at 2019 improved by 62%, while access to adequate sanitary facilities in urban areas stood at 58%, and 29% in rural areas.

According to several studies, drinking water and sanitation services in Cameroon, which are paramount in the SDGs composed of eight targets that cover the following areas: access to drinking water, access to sanitation and hygiene, quality of water and wastewater, use of water resources and water shortages, management of water resources, ecosystems related to water, international cooperation, capacity building and stakeholder participation.

The Sustainable Development Report, a global assessment of countries' progress towards the sustainable development goals in other areas like development, justice and accountability, does not give Cameroon an overall pass grade, though there has been substantial progress.

Some development experts say the goals are hard to be satisfactorily achieved "because they fail to address human population growth".     

The one million dollar question is and remains whether it is in conferences like the one in Hamburg that there could be some adjustments? However, while the world "is running out of time" in the face of challenges like poverty, conflicts and climate disasters like the recent flood disaster in the Far North Region, each country gives priority to its own situation.

This is why Yaounde needs to rely more on the abundant resources that nature has so generously endowed it with to tackle its poverty and other development problems, rather than looking up to humanitarian assistance that comes in drips.

This article was first published in The Guardian Post issue No:3254 of Wednesday October 09, 2024