Pakistan: Progress Towards Sustainable Development Goal 16

Description

The objective of this report is to assess progress towards four SDG targets linked to anti-corruption and government transparency – 16.4, 16.5, 16.6 and 16.10. A number of policy areas are covered under each of these four SDG targets. They provide a holistic overview of a country‘s anti-corruption progress in a way that goes beyond the narrow understanding of corruption captured by the official global indicators.

TI Pakistan is also pleased to note that the Government of Pakistan has taken several important steps aligned with the targets of SDG 16 including spearheading the effort to present Pakistan‘s Voluntary National Review (VNR) report at 2019 session of the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF). However, alarmingly the VNR report did not include Pakistan‘s progress on Goal 16.

TI Pakistan understands the insufficient coverage of and data availability for official SDG 16 indicators, therefore, an effort has been made in this report to present alternative indicators and data sources which the federal and the provincial governments can use as an input to feed into the national review on Goal 16. The report also identifies the gaps in terms of implementation and suggests actionable recommendations. It is hoped that the Government of Pakistan and the relevant departments will utilize this report to improve the identified policy areas so as to pave the way for the effective implementation of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.

The report provides independent analysis to complement and scrutinise official government progress reports related to SDG targets that focus directly on corruption. It provides a comprehensive picture of national anti-corruption progress across a range of policy areas. More specifically, targets 16.4 (illicit financial and arms flows), 16.5 (reduce bribery and other forms of corruption), 16.6 (transparent and accountable institutions) and 16.10 (access to information) are analysed in depth.

Contents

1. Executive Summary and Major Findings
2. Scorecard
3. National progress made towards SDG targets 16.4, 16.5, 16.6 and 16.10
4. Recommendations

Recommendations

The report makes a series of recommendations that the federal and provincial governments should prioritise in order to achieve Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

• The provision for Voluntary Return and Plea Bargain should abolished to discourage corruption
• Ensure compliance with FATF recommendations
• Election Commission code of conduct for internal democratic governance of Political Parties, should be strictly enforced
• The political parties must have independent audits, disclose their source of funding, financial spending and make audit reports online for public scrutiny.
• Pass whistleblower protection legislation at provincial levels
• Ensure that right-to-information requests are effectively processed
• Improve transparency of public procurement processes in government contracting
• Mechanisms should be designed to engage any civil society organization during budget formulation.
• The government needs to embrace and facilitate adoption of the concept of Open Government.

Authors

Lead Authors

Mr. Kashif Ali and Mr. Shamail Adnan Khan

TI Pakistan oversight

Mr. Syed Adil Gilani (Managing Director, TI Pakistan)

Management and support team

Mr. Ashfaque Ahmed, Ms. Faiza Mubarak, Ms. Farkhanda Jabeen

Date

02/07/2020

Tags