Last Tuesday, Gala Díaz Langou, Director of CIPPEC’s Social Protection Program, gave a speech at the UN Summit on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Gala Díaz Langou, CIPPEC’s Social Protection Program Director, was one of last Tuesday’s speakers at the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), a UN Summit on the 2030 Agenda held in New York, which started on 10th July and will end next Wednesday.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is an instrument agreed upon by the international community in 2015 to end poverty, hunger and gender inequality, among many other goals. It is a framework anchored around 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aims to transform the global development process. At the HLPF,
each national government reports on their annual progress towards the 2030 Agenda, while other civil society stakeholders provide input at side events.

‘Ensuring access to universal social protection is a prerequisite for achieving the 2030 Agenda´ highlighted Díaz Langou in her speech. ‘The SDGs are a great opportunity to address pending issues’ she added and then moved on to emphasize that the juvenilization of poverty is Argentina’s most serious unresolved problem.

‘The 2030 Agenda prioritizes the most underprivileged groups, and for Argentina this means concentrating its efforts on those households with the highest number of children and women’ she pointed out to a packed audience. Finally, Díaz Langou said that ‘there is fiscal room to manoeuvre to ensure universal access to social protection´.
She therefore concluded that ‘the fact that said universal access is not currently a reality only shows a lack of political will’.

The side event in which CIPPEC’s Social Protection Program Director participated was called ‘Universal Social Protection: End Poverty and Reduce Inequality´. It took place on the afternoon of 18th July, some hours after the Argentine government presentation given by Gabriela Agosto, Secretary of the National Council for the Coordination of Social Policies, which is the entity responsible for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in the country.

Díaz Langou’s presentation called ‘Universal Social Protection: Key Issues requiring National and International Action’ focused on describing the state of affairs and the policies currently in force and included recommendations for improving early childhood policies. CIPPEC centered its analysis on 4 SDGs – goals number 1, 2, 3 and 5: no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, and gender equality, respectively.

CIPPEC’s work revolves around 10 of the 17 SDGs (goals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 13, 16 and 17), which mainly focus on social and economic issues, as detailed in the paper ‘Objetivos de desarrollo sostenible. El aporte de CIPPEC a la Agenda 2030’ (‘Sustainable Development Goals. CIPPEC’s contribution towards the 2030 Agenda’) available here.

Click here for the paper called ‘Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible y la primera infancia en la Argentina: brechas y acciones prioritarias para no dejar a nadie atrás´ (‘Sustainable Development Goals and Early Childhood in Argentina: gaps and priority actions to leave no one behind´), on which the presentation of CIPPEC’s Social
Protection Program Director was based.