Cairo, February 10th (ECA) - The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) held on 2-5 February 2020 a three-day training workshop on the Integrated Planning and Reporting Toolkitin partnership with the Egyptian Ministry of Planning and Economic Development (MPED).
An ECA sponsored web application, the Integrated Planning and Reporting Toolkit (IPRT) aims to respond to African countries’ need to integrate both the Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030) and Africa’s Agenda 2063 for development into their national development plans.
“The workshop introduced the ECA Integrated Planning and Reporting Tool (IPRT) to planning officials in Egypt as a tool that responds to the needs of African countries to simultaneously adopt and integrate both the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and Agenda 2063 into their national development plans”, said Ahmed Al-Awah, Chief of the ECA IT Strategic Advisory Unit.
Al-Awah explained that the IPRT will support planning officials’ efforts to align their national development plans with Agenda 2030 and Agenda 2063 and promote its continued use in common reporting on progress made by Egypt in achieving the goals, targets and indicators of their national development plans as well as both agendas in a harmonized way.
“The IPRT Toolkit facilitates the alignment of Egypt’s National Agenda for Sustainable Development with the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 as well as Africa’s Agenda 2063 on the three levels: goals, targets and indicators. Therefore, it allows us to monitor and visualize Egypt’s performance under all of the three agendas, and compare it to that of other countries. In addition to that, it is a dynamic software that responses to the needs of the users”, said Howaida Barakat, Head of the Sustainable Development Unit at the Egyptian Ministry of Planning and Economic Development.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 is anchored around 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a total of 169 targets and 232 indicators covering economic, social development, and environmental protection.
“Until 2019, only 8 African countries (Egypt, Ghana, Malawi, Niger, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo and Uganda) had 140 indicators or above out of a total of 232 SDG indicators”, said ECA statistician Molla Hunegnaw Asmare.
The Agenda 2063 launched in 2013 sets several steps for the region to achieve its vision for “an integrated and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens, representing a dynamic force in the international arena” by the year 2063.
By using the IPRT, Egypt will be able to facilitate its assessment of progress made towards both the SDGs and Agenda 2063. “The goals, targets and indicators of the two Agendas are in-built into the software and users can visually assess the level of alignment between the two Agendas at the click of a button. In-built dashboards allow for the visualization of summary information on country alignment and performance in implementation of the national goals and targets as aligned with the Agenda 2030 and Agenda 2063”, said ECA Economic Affairs Officer Paul Mpuga.
“The fact that (IPRT) will support monitoring and evaluation on the sub-national level with disaggregated data is impressive and will allow for more in-depth analysis. Furthermore, adding the feature of forecasting Egypt’s performance in the future will be extremely interesting and beneficial, to help identify priority action areas for the country”, added Dr Barakat.
Since 2019, 18 African countries have benefited from ECA trainings on IPRT. In the coming months, more countries will be covered including Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, Sudan and Tunisia.
Issued by
Communication Team
Economic Commission for Africa
Office for North Africa
Tel: +212 (0) 537 548 749
Email: filali-ansary@un.org; cea.an.coms@gmail.com