UNGA, SDGs: Beyond the jamboree, where are results?
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By Morenike Taire, Woman Editor
UNGA has come and gone. The flags have been lowered, the motorcades have disappeared, the bilateral meetings are over and the Nigerian delegation has returned home. But the questions that followed Nigeria to New York remain. What, after decades of attending global development summits, has Nigeria actually achieved? And, more pointedly, as the 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) draws closer, are these annual pilgrimages producing results at home or merely another jamboree on the international calendar?
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For Nigeria, the uncomfortable answer is difficult to escape. The United Nations General Assembly, UNGA, may be about diplomacy, global partnerships and international advocacy. But in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and now the SDGs, it should also be about accountability. Nigeria has participated, presented reports, made commitments and signed up to targets. Yet, on many of the indicators that matter to ordinary Nigerians, progress remains painfully slow.
From MDGs to SDGs
The MDGs, adopted at the UN Millennium Summit, ran from 2000 to 2015. They later gave way to the 17 SDGs under the 2030 Agenda, with a broader emphasis on universal development, country ownership and Voluntary National Reviews. The MDGs recorded important global gains, including a reduction in extreme poverty and increased access to primary education. But progress was uneven, and Nigeria struggled to translate the goals into sustained national outcomes.
Professor and former Health Minister, Adenike Grange, told Vanguard that the problem was never simply a shortage of policies. “We must have the right political structure, commitment, and we must also be able to retain our trained human resource,” she said, arguing that without meritocracy and coordination, no number of development goals could deliver the desired outcomes.
The same structural weaknesses now haunt the SDGs.
SDGs: Exposing the Gaps
Nigeria’s record remains sobering. The 2026 Sustainable Development Report places Nigeria 143rd out of 169 countries, with an SDG Index score of 55.7. India ranks 94th, Kenya 106th and South Africa 109th.
Nigeria’s life expectancy is about 55 years, compared with 66 in South Africa and 64 in Kenya. At the $3-a-day poverty line, the comparable figure for Nigeria is 41.8%, against 17.4% for South Africa and 45.5% for Kenya.
More troubling is the pace of progress. Since 2015, Nigeria’s SDG score has risen by only about 2.3 percentage points, compared with 9.6 points for India.
The gaps are visible across virtually every major development indicator. Multidimensional poverty reached 62.9% in 2021. About 45.4 million Nigerians were undernourished in 2023, while 33.8% of children under five were stunted in 2024.
Even where access has improved, the quality of that access remains a concern. In 2024, 82.2% of Nigerians had access to basic drinking water, but only 29.9% had safely managed drinking water. Electricity access stood at 61.2% in 2023, while only 26.2% primarily used clean cooking fuels and technologies.
Government spending on essential education services also fell dramatically, from 8.5% of total government expenditure in 2012 to just 3% in 2024.
These are not merely statistics. They are evidence of the distance between Nigeria’s international commitments and the lived reality of its citizens.
The Government Perspective: Goal Mainstreaming
The Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on SDGs, OSSAP-SDGs, insists that Nigeria has built a comprehensive architecture for implementation.
According to the office, the SDGs have been integrated into national and sectoral development plans, supported by the Nigeria SDGs Implementation Plan 2020–2030, national indicators, monitoring frameworks, financing mechanisms and three Voluntary National Reviews. State SDG offices have also been established, while six regional SDG Innovation Hubs are being developed to strengthen implementation.
There have, undoubtedly, been interventions and measurable gains in some areas. The problem is that they are difficult to reconcile with the scale of Nigeria’s development deficit. As OSSAP-SDGs itself acknowledges, Nigeria has also been battered by the “Triple C” crises of climate change, conflict and COVID-19. But crises do not explain everything.
Fiscal Constraints, Insecurity to Blame
Country Director of the International Rescue Committee, Babatunde Ojei, puts the problem more bluntly: Nigeria’s challenge is less about policy intent than execution, financing and data quality. Fiscal constraints, insecurity, weak service delivery and inadequate data continue to undermine implementation.
Nigeria also faces a huge financing gap. UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed has estimated that the country needs about $10 billion annually to achieve the SDGs by 2030. That cannot come from government alone. But attracting private capital requires trust, transparency, credible institutions and an environment in which investors believe projects will survive beyond political cycles.
UNGA: Jamboree or Opportunity?
This is where the annual UNGA spectacle becomes difficult to ignore. For years, Nigeria’s participation has attracted criticism over large delegations, foreign trips, estacode, shopping excursions and the perception that international meetings are opportunities for personal travel rather than national development.
The criticism is not new. During the Jonathan administration, then Foreign Affairs Minister Ambassador Bashir Wali reportedly sought to limit Nigeria’s delegation after an estimated 600 Nigerians attended the 2013 General Assembly. The Buhari administration later reduced the official delegation dramatically, with only 17 government delegates attending one UN gathering.
After the controversy surrounding Nigeria’s 1,411-strong delegation to COP28 in Dubai, the Tinubu administration again moved to restrict official travel. The government has since required conditional clearance for delegates to major international meetings. The message is clear: Nigerians expect value for money.
They Are Not Jamborees — But…
OSSAP-SDGs argues that UNGA, the High-Level Political Forum and similar meetings are not inherently jamborees. They provide opportunities to report progress, negotiate priorities, attract investment, build partnerships and advocate reforms to the global financial system. That is true.
But the real test is not whether UNGA has diplomatic value. It is whether Nigeria converts that value into development outcomes. A country cannot continue presenting impressive plans abroad while its citizens struggle with poverty, insecurity, poor schools, unreliable electricity, inadequate healthcare and unsafe water at home.
Beyond UNGA
Perhaps the most promising development from the latest UNGA was the effort by seven northern governors to present the Northwest as an investment destination rather than merely a region defined by banditry and insecurity. UNDP Resident Representative Elsie Attafuah described the initiative as “exciting”, noting that the governors had developed a Peace, Security and Development framework and were attempting to make the region investable.
That is the kind of diplomacy Nigeria needs: diplomacy that comes home with investors, partnerships, technology, financing and measurable projects. As Attafuah rightly observed, having a framework is one thing; making it investable is another. And therein lies Nigeria’s larger UNGA challenge.
The jamboree is not the meetings, the receptions or even the shopping. The jamboree is what happens when the ceremony becomes an end in itself and the commitments never make it home.
The MDGs came and went. The SDGs have less than four years to run. Nigeria does not need another declaration of intent. It needs results.
As UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned, unless the world acts, the 2030 Agenda could become “an epitaph for a world that might have been.” For Nigeria, the question is whether, after all the UNGA speeches and handshakes, 2030 will be remembered as a missed opportunity—or the point at which the country finally moved beyond the jamboree.
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