IN September, the UN General Assembly agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals. SDGs are a set of universal goals agreed on after three years of negotiations. They are an expansion of the Millennium Development Goals agreed on at the beginning of the new century; the MDGs expired last month.

The eight MDGs were chiefly concerned with reducing hunger and poverty, achieving universal education, promoting gender equality, reducing child and maternal mortality, combating HIV and malaria, ensuring environmental sustainability and promoting global partnerships.

Over a period of 15 years, some countries worked hard to meet these globally agreed goals; others made modest progress lagging far behind on MDG-directed development goals. In South Asia, Bangladesh, India and Nepal did well on some indictors while Pakistan lagged lamentably behind on almost all of them. Now that the MDGs are out of the way, a post-mortem is being conducted on what was good and not so good about them.

The SDGs have more input from civil society.

Broadly, the MDGs provided a conceptual framework and pointed some pathways out of chronic underdevelopment which has been the bane of developing countries. Although the MDGs were applicable to all countries, they came to be associated mostly with the developing countries that suffered from a different level of underdevelopment. Developed countries used them as aid-guiding instruments to channel aid into areas where development was deeply desired.

But the MDGs have also attracted criticism for not addressing issues of human rights, inequality, migration and economic development and for failing to offer an integrated and holistic vision for development. Today, at the expiry of the MDGs, a billion people still subsist on $1.25 per day. This scenario must be set against the growing food insecurity and rising economic inequality.

The limitations of the MDGs were very much on the mind of world leaders when the process of devising the SDGs got under way in 2012. The process of crafting post-MDG goals flowed from the Rio+20 summit in 2012 which kick-started the formation of an open working group to devise a draft agenda on a set of new goals which were to blend with the post-MDG development agenda.

However, unlike the MDGs which were crafted in relative secrecy with limited participation of civil society, the process of the formulation of the SDGs was thrown open from the very beginning with the UN engaging in the widest possible consultation exercise. In particular, the participation of civil society groups was more pronounced this time round. Inevitably, this led to very ambitious and unwieldy goals initially. However, after a long period of deliberations, the number of sustainable goals was narrowed to 17 comprehensive and integrated goals. In addition, 169 targets were attached to the SDGs.

Together, the goals and targets compose a very comprehensive development agenda which address some of the deficiencies of the MDGs. The SDGs are concerned with ending hunger and malnutrition, promoting education, gender equality, the sustainable management of water and sanitation, access to energy and sustainable human habitat. In addition, the goals focus on climate action, forest, agriculture, infrastructure and growing inequality.

This represents a good augury. Yet there remains a lot of work to do in the coming months and years to put concrete flesh on the conceptual bare bones of the SDGs. One of the challenging tasks that lie ahead relates to the measurement of SDGs. To this end, the work on devising measurable indictors is set to get under way in March.

Another thorny issue concerns funding. In July last year, a major conference on the financing of SDGs was convened in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. However, the conference ended without suggestions for concrete action on finding cash to sustainably fund the goals.

The intergovernmental committee of experts on sustainable development financing has estimated that funding the social safety net to reduce hunger would alone cost $66bn annually while the cost of upgrading the infrastructure (water, power, agriculture) could cost as much as $7 trillion globally.

The projected sums are huge by any measure. So it would not be easy to find the money required to realise the aspirational goals enshrined in the SDGs. The real challenge facing the world leaders now is to cough up more cash with the corresponding political will to finance action on the SDGs.

As with the climate change deal, the money may prove a stumbling block when viewed against the sagging commitment of Western governments to overseas aid. However, despite these teething problems, developing countries can use these goals to reset and focus on development targets as did some of the countries in South Asia, to the prosperity of the domestic population and the applause of the wider world.

The writer is a development consultant and policy analyst.

Published in Dawn, January 10th, 2016