SDG Integration in Myanmar: Evidence and Principle-based Approach
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The document discusses Myanmar's approach to integrating the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at a national level. It outlines the country's process of prioritizing development policies, identifying needs and gaps through stakeholder consultation to formulate national plans aligned with regional and global goals. It also discusses developing institutional capacity, raising awareness among stakeholders, and linking specific SDGs like gender, environment and private sector development to Myanmar's economic policy goals. Some challenges mentioned are limited understanding of the SDGs within government and public, as well as siloed policymaking and limited policy coherence analysis.
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SDG Integration in Myanmar: Evidence and Principle-based Approach
- 1. SDG Integration in Myanmar: Evidence and Principle-based Approach U Than Zaw Deputy Director General Ministry of Planning and Finance
- 2. Prioritizing and Planning the Implementation 1. Prioritizing Country’s Development Policy, Identifying Needs and Gaps, Stakeholders Consultation on Policy Recommendations to formulate the plan, set the priorities and sequencing 2. Planning Sectoral Planning, Regional Planning to reflect in National Plan 3. Aligning with Regional & Global Adjusting, aligning with the Regional and Global Implementation Plan ( E.g. ASEAN Stat, UNESCAP, UNSD SDGs Implementation, etc…) 4. Developing Capacity and strengthening institution Legal Framework, Strengthening the role of NSO, Statistical Cooperation Mechanism, Managerial Skills of Leaders of CSO 5. Awareness Raising Understanding by the development stakeholders to achieve participatory and inclusive development 2
- 3. Discussions on SDG Themes Gender Related SDGs (on going) 3 Environmental Statistics for SDGs Child Related SDGs Private Sector Development (on going)
- 4. Planning Framework in Myanmar Economic Policy Implementation: Sector Coordination Groups Monitoring 95 Procedures, Sector Plans, Region/State Plans Township Plans
- 5. Linking SDGs to Economic Policy 1 2 3 4 7 69 10 11 8 12 5 12 Economic Policy Goals
- 6. SDG Integration: Evidence and Principle-based Approach
- 7. Challenges in SDG Integration and Policy Coherence Overall: • Within government and among the public, more complete understanding of the details of the 2030 Agenda is needed. • High-level champions are needed. Challenges in Policy Coherence: • Limited experience in policy making. • Silos within government and limited analysis about synergies • Knowledge supply by research institutes is constrained by limited available research skills, and new institutes tend to prioritize training and networking over research.
- 8. Looking forward closer cooperation to achieve SDGs in 2030! Thank you for your kind attention! 8
Editor's Notes
- Thank you Moderator for inviting Myanmar to share about our experience in the SDG integration and lessons learned. As you can see in the title of my presentation, if someone asks me to summarize Myanmar’s SDG integration into one sentence, I would say that we are integrating the SDGs into our national and sub-national plans, by using evidence and principle-based approach. This message will be the key focus in my next slides. First, let me briefly explain what the very first steps were in Myanmar in localizing the SDGs.
- Myanmar has been prioritizing in the area of Development Policy, Identifying Needs and Gaps, Stakeholders Consultation on Policy Recommendations to formulate the plan. Myanmar is implementing strategic plan for regions and sectors which will reflect in National Plan as well as to be in line with SDGs implementation. These plans are adjusting and aligning with the regional and global implementation plan such as ASEAN Stat, UNESCAP and UNSD SDGs implementation. With the purpose of achieving progress of SDGs, NSO strengthen legal framework, role of NSO, Statistical Cooperation Mechanism, and managerial skills of leaders of CSO. To achieve participatory and inclusive development by the development stakeholders, workshops and trainings were held at CSO’s training room by inviting the participants from line ministries and private sectors.
- We also had high level discussions on several SDG themes. High Level Conference on New Vision New result for children in Myanmar and SDGs CLMV implementation workshop for Environmental Statistics were already done and there will be upcoming activities on SDGs for vulnerable groups and Women related SDGs very soon with the concept of “No one left behind”. Private Sector Development Committee was formed to ensure private sector development. National Export Strategy has been developed and the priorities areas are identified to provide the technical assistances and necessary support. While we were quick in adopting the SDGs in our policy discussions, we wanted to approach the SDG integration in a more structured way. In my next slides, I will explain where Myanmar is now in terms of the SDG integration and how we strengthened our approaches. First, I need to briefly show you Myanmar’s plan framework to help your understanding.
- In this slide, I will explain Myanmar’s planning framework. In 2016, our government has launched the Economic Policy, and this sets out 12 policy goals. Based on these policy goals, we have developed 95 key results areas, and we call them, “95 procedures”. At the same time, we have sectoral plans/strategies at the national level and these provide specific directions to sectoral ministries and departments at both national and sub-national level. At sub-national level, we have a five-year strategic plan in all of Myanmar’s 14 States and Regions, and we have annual plans formulated by each of Myanmar’s 330 Townships. We then have been strengthening our official statistics in order to inform the planning and monitoring. While Myanmar is not a data scarce country any more, I must say, we need to strengthen use of data in planning and monitoring. In addition, our government needs to improve its monitoring framework and capacities. Lastly, in this framework, we included partners. As we all know, a key ingredient for achieving national priorities and SDGs is the partnership. This month, we launched a new Operations Guideline for Sector Coordination Group(SCG) and members from civil society, private sector, and philanthropy organizations became official members of the SCGs, in addition to development partners. In the next slide, I will briefly introduce the link between our Economic Policy and the SDGs.
- As you can see in this slide, Myanmar's Economic Policy is designed to meet many of the Sustainable Development Goals, including the enhancement of infrastructure investment, agriculture, private sector, SMEs and, in particular, poverty alleviation. National reconciliation, job creation and preservation of natural resources, capacity building and creating opportunities for the young are the key objectives of our people-centered and inclusive policy. While our Policy is already closely linked to the Sustainable Development Goals, we believe linking is only one small part of the SDG integration. Last year, when we participated to the UNDP Regional Exchange Meeting in Bangkok, we saw other countries’ examples and it helped us reflect on what do we mean by the SDG integration in Myanmar: how do we want to define the SDG integration in Myanmar’s context. In our context, it meant simply, “planning effectively, spending public resources wisely, and monitoring actively in order to bring better lives to over 50 million people of Myanmar”. In order to do these things better, we needed a strategy. And we found this strategy from the core spirit of the 2030 agenda, which was grounded on data and principles of leave no one behind, inclusive consultation, and policy coherence. In my next slide, I will introduce what steps we took to promote our evidence and principle based approach towards the SDG integration.
- First, we wanted to establish evidence base for SDG indicators, so that the data can inform our ongoing discussions on the SDGs. We assessed availability of data for monitoring SDG indicators and the result was: Myanmar was ready to report on 44 indicators, and 98 more if we compute using existing data. Based on this result, we will be launched soon Myanmar’s first SDG Indicator Baseline Report. We then assessed how principles of the 2030 Agenda and SDGs are currently being practiced in Myanmar’s planning/budgeting/monitoring processes. We conducted surveys in six pilot Regions/States and conducted workshops with relevant government departments at both national and sub-national level. Based on these, we developed a discussion paper in order to propose recommendations on how to adopt the principles into our planning/budgeting/monitoring processes. In terms of the principles, we focused on evidence-based planning, inclusive planning, and integrated planning (here, although I said “planning”, this of course includes budgeting and monitoring). The discussion paper is currently under review within our Ministry. In this discussion paper, we tried best to provide practical and actionable recommendations, for example, updating planning manual and templates. We are eager to implement the recommendations coming out from the discussion paper, and we are currently piloting those recommendations for annual planning exercises in two Regions/States of Myanmar. Lastly, I want to highlight that we launched a new operating guidelines for the Sector Coordination Groups and this mandated that SCGs include representatives from the civil society and private sector as official members and that SCGs ensure synergies among relevant sectors. In my next and last slide, I will introduce key issues we are experiencing with the SDG integration and I will highlight a few issues specifically on policy coherence, which is the theme of this year’s Regional Knowledge Exchange meeting.
- If my previous slide was a glass half full view, now, I’m going to talk from the glass half empty point of view: “the challenges”. Before I explain our challenges, I would like to remind us that SDG integration in Myanmar’s context meant: “planning effectively, spending public resources wisely, and monitoring actively in order to bring better lives to over 50 million people of Myanmar”. With this in mind, in terms of integrating the SDGs into planning, budgeting, and monitoring processes, our key challenges are the following: Firstly, within the government, our awareness of the SDGs has increased the past year, however, we feel we need to deepen our understanding about the SDGs in order to be able to use it for our work. For example, 57 percent of the departments surveyed at sub-national level responded that they needed more understanding and training to ensure effective SDG implementation. Among the public, there is a lot less awareness about the SDGs. This is highly linked to the fact that Myanmar was once a closed country and it was disconnected from global agenda such as the MDGs, the predecessor of the SDGs. Secondly, we need high-level champions. Our government has a strong commitment to achieve the SDGs, and our Ministry has led the development of the SDG discussion paper as well as releasing an operating guidelines for sector coordination groups (SCGs). However, we need more high-level champions who can lead the SDG integration efforts. Our new Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Planning and Finance has been tasked to lead high-level discussions on the SDGs and this has already provided incentives to other ministries to cooperate. I will then touch upon some of key challenges in achieving policy coherence and finish my presentation. First, please note, our government has a limited experience in policy making, which is one of the legacy of our previous time. Before our country opened up, important decisions were typically made by acting military leaders, and security priorities dominated policymaking. Second, while we try best to coordinate among different government departments, and we have well-functioning government coordination committees, we continue to experience a silo culture within the government, which prevents us from seeing the big picture of what trade offs and spill over effects we can have across the policies. Our Ministry is keen in consolidating all existing sectoral policies/strategies to assess policy coherence. Third, as we know, a good policy making is informed by evidence and research. In Myanmar, we now see an increasing number of research institutes, however the information supplied by them is not really used by policy makers. Myanmar’s research institutes are challenged with limited research skills and most of them provide training service, rather than research works. I hope my presentation was useful and I look forward to learning from all of you during this year’s Knowledge Exchange Event.