he eight Millennium Development Goals agreed upon at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000 approached their deadline in 2015. They focused on reducing extreme poverty and hunger in the world as well as building foundations for social development by providing primary education, basic health care or employment to the global poor. Although they provided some tools to combat human suffering, the MDGs were also criticized for being disembedded from local activities and lacking strong objectives and analytical power. These shortcomings were to be overcome in the new post-2015 development agenda of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs were adopted in September 2015 at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit. The SDGs are ambitious goals to eliminate extreme poverty and hunger altogether, providing everyone with quality education, health care, clean water, decent work and access to sustainable energy. They also focus on gender equality and reducing global inequalities among countries. Moreover, they also endorse the commitment to sustainable development by changing industry, production and consumption patterns, combating climate change and deterioration of life in oceans, desertification and deforestation, and promoting world peace and global partnership. How these goals will be implemented is another challenge. Despite their ambition, concrete results are to be measured by fragmented and controversial indicators. Another contestation centres on the power of the private sector which was inscribed into the very logic of the SDGs.
In March 2014 we talked with women representatives of women’s and anti-poverty organisations in Lusaka, Zambia, about the contemporary development cooperation framework, the previous era of the MDGs as well as the upcoming challenges. Zambia is a country rich in resources and yet there is a lot of poverty, a country with progressive past and uncertain future in today’s unjust global economic and political arrangement.