A Decent Life... 4 Pillars, 5 UNSustainable Goals

The United Nations General Secretariat agreed to adopt and include the Egyptian presidential initiative "A Decent Life" within the organization's "Partnerships for the Achievement of Sustainable Development Goals" platform. 

The Ministry of Planning and Economic Development submitted a request to the International organization to register the presidential initiative. 

A Decent Life fulfills the platform’s smart criteria as it is targeted, measurable, achievable, based on available resources, and time-bound. 

It also leads to the implementation of the 2030 development plan. This is in addition to the initiative’s endeavor to localize the sustainable development goals in all its steps.

It is worth noting that the "Partnerships for the Achievement of Sustainable Development Goals" registry is an open online platform managed by the Sustainable Development Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 

A Decent Life initiative serves as the basis for identifying multi-stakeholder partnerships and voluntary commitments, to be presented during the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development held annually at United Nations Headquarters in New York. 

It is worth mentioning that this initiative has contributed to mitigating the negative impacts of COVID-19 through improving the standards of living conditions of the most in need groups. While providing job opportunities through supporting SMEs.

The goals of this initiative are to be achieved through: -

Providing decent housing.

Providing water and sanitation for deprived families.

Providing medical and educational services.

Establishing micro-projects for those most in need.

Providing in-kind support periodically to most in need families.

“A Decent Life” is an initiative endorsed by H.E President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, with the main objective of improving the quality of life in the poorest rural communities within the framework of the Sustainable Development Strategy: Egypt Vision 2030, through decreasing multidimensional poverty and unemployment rates.

The initiative has 4 pillars: 

1. Improving living-standards and investing in human capital,

2. Developing infrastructure services,

3. Raising the quality of human development services, and 

4. Economic development. Specially, it provides the poorest villages with increased access to the basic services such as health, education, water and sanitation…etc.

In January 2019, the first phase was launched targeting to cover 375 villages across Egypt. By launching the second phase, in January 2021, the number of targeted villages increased to 1500, with the number of beneficiaries representing 20% of the overall Egyptian population.

The Decent Life initiative comes as an affirmation of the state's willingness to implement the participatory planning approach through integrating citizens in the need’s identification stage, along with the government and civil society's participation in the implementation and monitoring process.