Adoption of 'Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development'

Adoption of the 2030 Agenda at the United Nations

Today, September 25th 2015, world leaders gathered in New York to officially adopt Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development(2030 Agenda). The new agenda brings a fundamental shift for all people and the planet and seeks to promote, protect and fulfill human rights for all. We as CBM are celebrating this historic moment as the 2030 Agenda is inclusive of the world's one billion persons with disabilities.

Persons with disabilities make up a significant number of people living in the poorest countries. Yet despite this, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the predecessor to the 2030 Agenda - did not name persons with disabilities in its targets and indicators. The 2030 Agenda builds on the lessons learnt from the MDGs and recognizes that unless persons with disabilities are named and counted, they will be left behind in global development efforts. 

The new 2030 Agenda connects persons with disabilities to global poverty reduction efforts, measures access to equitable education and promotes accessible and inclusive cities. The commitment to data disaggregation by disability is an important step in assessing how inclusive the implementation of the 2030 Agenda will be for persons with disabilities.

While there is much to celebrate, gaps remain with the new agenda. Persons with disabilities are not explicitly included in either the health or gender goals. In addition, many of the practicalities have yet to be worked on how to ensure that all of the agenda is inclusive to persons with disabilities. CBM over the coming years will continue to work with its allies at international, regional and national level to ensure the implementation of the new agenda is fully inclusive of persons with disabilities.

Publication

To coincide with the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, CBM is launching a publication Dialogues on Sustainable Development: A Disability-Inclusive Perspective. The publication aims to highlight the inclusion of persons with disabilities is relevant across all development themes, for example, Gender Equality, WASH and Disaster Risk Reduction.