SMP submits to UK Parliamentary Inquiry

The Scotland Malawi Partnership has made a submission to the UK Parliament International Development Committee’s inquiry on the Sustainable Development Goals. In keeping with our commitment to full transparency, we have published our submission on the SMP website.

In the submission, the SMP promotes a spirit of dignified two-way partnership, as the UK looks to adopt and implement the SDGs, moving beyond a narrative of “donors” and “recipients”.

We use the submission to share our network’s eleven ‘partnership principles’ which guide all our work: we believe these are as valuable to DFID and the UN as to individual people-to-people links, and we encourage DFID to advance this same spirit of partnership in its implementation of the SDGs.

We also state that we think the SDGs can only succeed if we can inspire and mobilise the great energy that exists within civil society, and we encourage DFID to explore more pro-active ways of working in synergy with wider civic society as it embraces the SDGs.

We use the opportunity to also celebrate the universality behind the new SDGs: that these are targets for the global north as much as the global south, and we encourage the UK Government to take these domestic obligations as seriously as their international commitments, promoting the core tenets of Policy Coherence for Development.

Finally, and in response to the questions posed in the terms of this inquiry, we urge the UK Government not to pick and choose individual SDGs to prioritise, or to prioritise one country or region over another.

We are grateful for the opportunity to feed into this inquiry and hope that the new International Development Committee continues its commitment to visiting Scotland each year to meet with civic society.

We always look to best represent our members views, interests and priorities as we make such submissions, and in all our advocacy work. As always, we very much value all member input. Please email david(at)scotland-malawipartnership.org to feed in your views.