RCEM Hosts Virtual Civil Society Forum

Written by Tamara Starr

On March 18, over a hundred participants logged on for the Regional Civil Society Engagement Mechanism (RCEM) hosted a virtual Civil Society Forum.

Oli Henman, Global Coordinator for Action for Sustainable Development (A4SD), presented the National Civil Society Reporting for the HLPF 2020.

Henman went over the lessons learned from the first 4 years, human rights dimension, and HLPF reform recommendations.  The recommendations included the following:

After the presentation, the participants were broken up into groups and discussed the following questions: 

Q1: What are the main structural barriers in your country, in terms of Agenda 2030 implementation? What are the issues governments in your country are not reporting on?

Q2: Is the VNR process in your country open to civil society? Is there a structured process? Is there legislation on the national level to ensure participation of CSOs in decision-making processes related to Agenda 2030? Are there good examples of what is working well, or has been achieved?

Q3: What can civil society do to create an inclusive space for work on VNRs to ensure that no one is left behind? 

For all of these questions, many of the participants felt that there needed to be changes made on the government level, as well as a paradigm shift within the idea of gender norms and even among those who have a disability.

One group even posted that, “The High-Level Political Forum 2020 needs to include synergies with SDGs and UNGA to agree on a process for the updating of the SDG targets with an end date of 2020.”