Assistant Minister of Planning reviews the Egyptian experience in harmonizing national development plans with Africa’s Agenda 2063

Dr. Mona Essam, Assistant Minister of Planning and Economic Development for Sustainable Development Affairs participated today at the  activities of a session entitled “Aligning National Development Plans with Continental and Global Development Agendas”.

The aforementioned session is considered the first one of the annual ministerial meeting of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM)

on the Community of Practices for National Development Planning, which was held over two days, September 10 and 11 .

The ministerial meeting goes under the title of “Critical governance policies to implement Africa's Agenda 2063 and the Global Goals” in cooperation between the Ministries of Planning and Economic Development and Foreign Affairs as well as (APRM).

During the session, Dr. Mona Essam said that, given the magnitude of the global, regional, and national challenges that hinder other countries around the world, especially developing countries, from achieving the goals of the 2030 Sustainable Development Plan and the Africa Agenda 2063, the international and regional goals for sustainable development provide a comprehensive approach and a road map towards improving the livelihoods of individuals as well as preserving the rights of future generations.

Essam added that Egypt's Vision 2030 represents the national framework for implementing global and continental agendas.

She noted that the vision has been updated to ensure better consistency between the strategic objectives of Egypt's Vision 2030 and the international objectives as well as the objectives of the African agenda.

Essam added that the concept of alignment is not limited to the strategic level only, but rather is a process that extends to medium- and short-term plans.

She explained that the Ministry of Planning worked to link the government’s work program to the sustainable development goals to reflect the direct impact of the program’s implementation on achieving SDGs.

Essam stressed the importance of achieving integration and consistency between development and financial planning.

She referred to the efforts of the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development to begin evaluating and analyzing investment flows toward implementing sustainable development goals, by linking the projects of investment plans for the years from 2019 to 2023 with SDGs to determine the goals that need more investment to achieve.

  Essam also highlighted the partnership between the Egyptian government, represented by the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development, with the Office of the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Egypt in many areas, including work on the Integrated National Financing Framework project, which aims to develop capabilities, and simple systems to measure financing flows and come up with a national strategy to finance SDGs.

Essam also stressed the importance that the state attaches to localizing sustainable development at the governorate level, pointing to the state’s efforts in this framework, represented by the localization reports that were launched in 2021, which cover all governorates of the Republic and include data on the governorates’ performance in the SDGs indicators.

Essam added that all these efforts enabled Egypt to host a regional technical center, the “Cairo Center for the Localization of SDGs,” in cooperation with the United Nations Human Settlements Program and the United Nations Development Programme, to be an Egyptian center of excellence for achieving the goals of sustainable development and the aspirations of the African Agenda 2063. 

Dr. Mona Essam pointed out that Egypt submitted three voluntary local reports at the governorate level for the Port Said, Beheira, and Fayoum governorates.

Moreover, Essam addressed the challenges facing the process of aligning national plans with regional and global agendas.

She noted that some of them relate to the level of awareness of the sustainable development goals and the African agenda, in addition to the lack of technical expertise in some institutions to ensure proper compatibility with international goals and continental ambitions.

Essam explained that one of the most important challenges is that there is a kind of difficulty in linking goals and indicators at the strategic level with executive indicators that measure results and outputs at the levels of projects and activities.

Essam referred to the national consultations report submitted by Egypt, which evaluated the first decade of implementing Africa’s Agenda 2063 and identified the main considerations for the next ten years.

Essam pointed out that some important considerations were monitored as follows: emphasizing citizen-centered development, expanding the scope of localization of sustainable development goals and the 2063 Agenda.