Research proposal

Research proposal

Instructions

This assignment must be done in groups of maximum five (5) people. Every group member must actively participate in doing this assignment.

This assignment must be typed before submitting.

Every group member must sign against his/her name before submitting.

The assignment must be submitted in three (3) weeks’ time from the date it was given out in

class.

Ensure that you maintain the SOPs once you go to the field to do the assignment.

Wear your mask, use your hand sanitizer and maintain a social distance always.

Question

Visit an area in Uganda (rural or urban) of your own choice and answer the following questions:

1. Name the area visited.
2. Using examples, discuss the characteristics of the area which your group has visited.
3. To what extent have Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) listed below and bolded, been attained in the area you have visited? (Give evidence using examples from the area you have visited).

• End extreme poverty.
• Zero hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
• Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
• Quality education.
• Ensure access to reliable, affordable, sustainable and modern energy for all.
• Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impact.

4. Discuss the challenges that might hinder attainment of the SDGs by 2030 in the area you have

visited.

5. As an economist, suggest possible ways of dealing with the challenges in question (4) above.

Note: Provide images/photographs for the area you have visited to support your answer above. Attach the

images/photos in appendix.

Area Visited

Kasokoso , located in Nakawa division , Kampala District.

Characteristics

The following are some of the key characteristics of Kasokoso.

1. The living standards is poor this is purely characterized by increased majority of the people staying in slummy living conditions where most of the neighborhoods do not have toilets.
2. Majority of people stay in wetlands area and these areas are prone to floods, this also increases the destruction of the eco system by the residents something that in long run leads to poverty among the community members.

• Majority of the building built here are for low income earners and this is reflected by the quality of the houses around.

1. The community members in Kasokoso most of them lack toilets.
2. The community members are also mainly illiterates despite the place’s proximity to the city.
3. The health system of the area is poor and there is no major hospital in the area.

• Majority of the people in Kasokoso lack access to clean water and a s a result they fetch water from wells nearby.
• The health conditions of the area is generally poor

1. The level of sanitation is also very poor since the area is now used as a dumping area for cabbage.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are intended to be universal in the sense of embodying a universally shared common global vision of progress towards a safe, just and sustainable space for all human beings to thrive on the planet. They reflect the moral principles that no-one and no country should be left behind, and that everyone and every country should be regarded as having a common responsibility for playing their part in delivering the global vision. In general terms, all of the goals have therefore been conceived as applying both as ambitions and as challenges to all countries. All of the goals and targets contain important messages and challenges for developed and developing countries alike.

QUESTION 3

The following description gives the extent to which Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) listed below have been attained in the area we visited? (Give evidence using examples from the area you have visited).

End extreme poverty.

The World Bank has attempted to overcome this challenge through the new definition by simply increasing the $1.25 (2005 PPP) poverty line to $1.90 (2011 PPP), to reflect a rise in the price of goods around the world. However, this approach no longer factors in how national poverty lines have changed over time. It implicitly assumes that the $1.25 (2005 PPP) line is the most appropriate extreme poverty line and it only needs to be updated to reflect those changes in price levels as opposed to underlying changes in how the poorest countries in the world define poverty.

Quality education; Access to quality education which provides children with the knowledge and life skills they need to realize their full potential. It’s also essential to creating change in a child’s life. Plan International helps by training teachers, building new schools and breaking down barriers that prevent many children and girls in particular from attending school and staying in school.

Quality education; Access to quality education which provides children with the knowledge and life skills they need to realize their full potential. It’s also essential to creating change in a child’s life. Plan International helps by training teachers, building new schools and breaking down barriers that prevent many children – and girls in particular – from attending school and staying in school.

Access to Healthcare; Access to health is essential. Plan International helps communities build health clinics, train health care workers and invest in equipment and medicine, so children can grow up healthy and strong.

Water & sanitation; Water and sanitation are also essential for every child’s survival. Each year, Plan International helps communities build school latrines, community water points and helps to establish organizations to ensure the continued management and maintenance of water points.

Economic security; Economic security: means people have the skills and resilience they need to withstand hard economic times and grow their incomes. Plan International works to overcome poverty by helping communities around the world gain the economic security they need to thrive, this includes training people living in poverty to acquire the skills and knowledge they need to secure a livelihood, and support their families.

Child participation; Child participation: means that children are at the center of everything we do. Plan International helps children learn their rights and take active roles within their community. Child participation helps children engage in citizenship, express their views and make decisions that will shape their future and influence the people around them.

Zero hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable

67% of Ugandans are either poor or highly vulnerable, with deprivation rates higher than average in rural areas. The majority of people in extreme in need by reason of youth, age, ill-health, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantages. Rural areas of Uganda often experience severe droughts and have limited access to free education, and a poor road network which further limits opportunities. In the area it can be observed that majority of the people in the area are involved in small scale business which provides daily income and helps in fighting poverty.

Agriculture.

Agriculture & Food Security is a peer-reviewed open access journal that addresses the challenge of global food security. It publishes articles within the field of food security research, with a particular focus on research that may inform more sustainable agriculture and food systems that better address local, regional, national and/or global food and nutritional insecurity. The pioneering advances in research reported in Agriculture & Food Security have far reaching implications both for the developing world and for sustainability in the developed world. In the area there is presence of good roads which facilities transporting of agriculture comedies to help in the fight against extreme hunger.

Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

Better management of water and sanitation is needed to sustain human wellbeing, while preserving the resilience of the ecosystem. A significant progress has been attained in the area, as the proportion of population with access to improved drinking water sources has increased from approximately 76 to 91 percent. Almost every resident in the area can access safe water easily. The government has tried by all means to bring pipe water nearer to the area.

However, there is still high level of poor sanitation, combined with irregular water supply which hinders development and claims the lives of countless people. These challenges are likely to magnify in the future due to an ever growing population needing to share already inadequate and often badly managed resources. Being the primary factor that increases water, air, soil and food contamination, lack of proper access to water in dense urban areas exponentially increases local pollution problems. While existing urban water distribution and sanitation systems are all too often run down and unable to cope with the growing urban expansion where growth demand is difficult to foresee and plan for newly built systems often also lack inclusion and resilience, as the urban poor tend to be excluded from these services.

Quality education

Quality education is necessary to tackle poverty and achieve progress in all aspects of sustainable development. Significant advancements in the area have been made towards literacy rates and enrollment in primary education. Many parents in Kasokoso have endeavored to send their children to school in all levels right from Primary to University level. Despite continuous population growth, the number of out-of-school children in the area has decreased. Additionally, education in the area is still severely affected by a number of existing and partially growing socio-economic inequalities such as gender, race and income.

Ensure access to reliable, affordable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

This Sustainable Development Goal calls on leaders to accelerate sustainable energy solutions, central to almost every major issue the world faces today. While significant improvements in energy supply have been made many people still lack access to electricity. The quality of energy supply is another issue. As the global energy supply still consists of widespread use of fossil fuels, the transition to renewable energy is at the heart of this SDG, using the diversity of resources, combined with modern energy efficient technologies that address climate change mitigation, efficient energy generation and demand, and resilient energy infrastructure. In the area we visited this SDG goal has not yet been attained as majority of the people living in the area do not access reliable, affordable, sustainable and modern energy. A majority of the residents in the area are still very poor. They use charcoal, fire wood as the source of energy. They cannot even afford electricity. This implies that  that the goal  has not been attained

Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impact.

Climate change is expected to displace millions of people and scientists worry that we may be pushing the planet toward ecological collapse. In the area of kosokoso majority of people use electricity for cooking which therefore shows that they are taking a stand in fighting climate by specifically ensuring that they do not use trees which do increase environmental degradation.

Question 4

The following are the challenges that might hinder the attainment of the SDGs by 2030 in the area we visited.

Increasing global instability, including the recent financial crisis, the political turmoil in the around the city, and the problems caused by changing climate conditions has brought about growing insecurity. Insecurity is a lack of protection that we have in our lives. The effects of these processes are felt most in developing countries, where problems such as hunger, poverty, community stability, and access to education and health care are most acute.

Another challenge is translating development aims and targets into local level programmes by financing and delivering policies and packages that are relevant to the local context. The SDGs provide a set of targets and outcomes for sustainable development, and identify a number of principles for delivery of these outcomes.Translating these into concrete programmes that create real change is of course a complicated process. Some people think that focusing on these broad aims and targets takes away from meaningful community work. When we talk about outcomes in the development space, these are often measured by indicators based on many different areas of human life. This can include outcomes measuring income and wealth and the development of individuals, which is supported by the Human Development Index tool. How the macro level targets are broken down into real world programmes and practise, how they are delivered, how they are financed, and how individuals and economies are affected remains a challenge

Lack of fully developed infrastructure to support networking, high‐performance computing, and the lack of manpower to operate and support a database management system, and the absence of policies regarding infrastructure in developing nations and underdeveloped countries, will become indicators of inability for the SDGs.

Question 5

As an economist, the following are the suggested possible ways of dealing with the challenges in question (4) above.

For Sustainable Development Goal of Zero hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable

As an economist I would encourage putting more emphasis on technology and data to drive improvement. The availability of quality data allows for an effective assessment of the outcome of any intervention. The gathering of data on a massive scale and the analysis of the data requires investment in technology. This allows for determination of trends and themes and to allow for adjustments to be made when departing from agreed objectives. The non-availability and reliability of data are the most often reported challenges with regards to the implementation of the SDGs and subsequently in the interpretation of progress reports

As an economist I would encourage capacity building. Capacity building is important to the success of the SDGs and its goal is to provide the long-term foundation for transformation. While this is often location specific, at a fundamental level, it will require all sectors in all countries to acquire new skillsets and toolkits for sustainability. It requires training and education in systems approaches to solutions, trans disciplinary initiatives, and co design. What is required is a new generation and category of sustainability professionals who can broker between global, national, and local issues, between research and use, and between biophysical and social aspects of sustainability; notably, this need is as acute in higher as in lower income countries. This may be difficult for most African countries due to the shortage of skilled workforce. However, there is no better time than now for these countries to call upon the skills and knowledge of their citizens in the diaspora.

Financial prudence and accountability. There must be accountability for inputs into SDGs at all levels. Donor support to leverage private investment and private finance generally needs to be compliant with development effectiveness principles, and there must be robust environmental and social safeguards. There is need for transparency about how private finance is utilized and political leaders and public servants need to show integrity in the manner funds from any source are utilized.

Finance. achieving success in a programme as huge as the SDGs requires a massive amount of financial investments. The rough calculations have put the cost of providing social safety nets to eradicate extreme poverty globally at about $66 billion a year, while annual investments to improve infrastructure (water, agriculture, transport, and power) could be up to a total of $7 trillion globally. At the international level, most developed countries have not met the target of allocating 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) to international aid in the last 40 years. It will help provide much needed funds required to implement the goals if these countries could meet their international aid targets.

Among the priorities, metric devising is the core, as it provides an informational tool for the SDGs. Metrics should be simple and easily understood by the community who uses and implements them. As Lu et al. (2015) rightly point out, terms such as sustainable, efficient, and substantial need to be defined quantitatively. Care should be taken when developing the parameters, keeping in mind the potential inequality of a country’s position. A designed set of practical indices for goals, targets, and progress‐monitoring indicators can be prepared for tracking progress on each of the SDGs. These metrics need to be updated periodically to take into account the present situation and practical experiences.

Appendices

References

Alex, F. 2015. Measuring the SDGs: investments in mapping, geospatial data collection critical to success. http://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2015/05/measuring-sdgs-investments-mapping-geospatial-data-collection-critical-success

Bakshi, S. K., and I. Kumar. 2013. India and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Policy brief, November 2013. Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi, India.

Beisheim, M., H. Lokken, N. Moore, and L. Pinter. 2015. Measuring sustainable development: How can science contribute to realizing the SDGs? Working paper FG 8. Stiftung, Wissenschaft, und Politik, Berlin, Germany.

Biodiversity Indicators Partnership. 2010. Biodiversity indicators and the 2010 target: experiences and lessons learnt from the 2010 Biodiversity Indicators Partnership. Technical series number 53, 196. Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Montréal, Quebec, Canada.