At the ongoing United Nations General Assembly, the President of Nigeria, Muhammed Buhari, announced the adoption of the domestically integrated Sustainable Development Goals (iSDGs) simulation model, in formulating Nigeria’s next national development plan.

This is as the administration is in the process of developing a successor plan to the Nigeria Vision 20:2020 and the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP), that would terminate in Dec-2020. Notably, the domestication of the iSDG model seeks to integrate the peculiarity of the Nigerian economy into achieving the goals of the SGSs by testing the impact of policy actions on key socio-economic variables.

At the beginning of the domestication process in 2017, the model was anchored at Nigeria’s Budget Office, now merged into the Ministry of Finance, Budget, and National Planning. While the adoption of the iSDG into national development planning will help to drive inclusive growth and provide reasonable policy cohesion, a couple of issues cast doubt on its success.

First is the risk of not effectively seeing it through. Second, the framework relies on macroeconomic and development statistics which are broadly unreliable in Nigeria. Lastly, the difficulty of attaining certain goals in the SDGs even if all resources were allotted to it, as observed during the simulation according to the Minister of Finance, is another concern.

SOURCE:https://brandspurng.com/2019/09/27/nigeria-to-launch-isdg-model-a-step-in-the-right-direction/