The countries of the United Nations approved a remarkable commitment to 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015 to be achieved by 2030.

On the one-year anniversary, it’s too early to start measuring their progress, but not too early to assess whether they are ready to make progress.

We have found that governments urgently need to improve their policy readiness if they want to have any chance of achieving the SDGs on inequalities.

Governments in most developing countries do not yet have the laws and policies in place to allow them to achieve SDG 5 on gender equality and SDG 10 on reducing inequality both within and among countries.

In ActionAid’s study, only three of ten developing countries – Brazil, South Africa, and Ghana -- have over 65% of key inequality-reducing policies in place now. Three countries (Senegal, Uganda and Zambia) had less than 50% in place.

To make things worse, the rich developed countries are not adequately supporting developing countries to achieve the SDGs, contrary to SDG 17’s commitment to “revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.” Indeed, some of those countries’ policies actually deepen inequalities globally.

“Policy readiness” measures whether governments have the basic agreements and tools to undertake this work. Implementation of those policies, and change in women’s lives, of course, will be the crucial determinant of whether countries achieve the SDGs. For now, we want to know whether governments have the basic building blocks in place.

Looking for Promising Signs

In preparing a report on women’s views on how inequality is manifested in communities around the world (provisionally titled Shifting Power and slated for publication in November 2016), ActionAid has assessed countries’ policy readiness to achieve the two SDGs explicitly targeting inequality (numbers 5 and 10).

We chose three targets from SDG 10 and four targets from SDG 5, selecting one or two policy readiness indicators per target. We researched information from global sources and then each of the ten countries studied had ActionAid staff and external experts validate the indicator table using ‘yes/no’ responses.

We have focused on ten of the developing countries where we work: Brazil, Ghana, Haiti, Liberia, Nepal, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia. In four developed countries with ActionAid offices -- Australia, Denmark, the UK, and the US – we look at the governments’ readiness to meet SDG 17, which outlines the imperative to “revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development” to facilitate universal achievement of the SDGs by 2030.

Income Inequality and Gender Inequality

Broadly speaking, the focus of the inequality debate which has sparked huge interest in recent years has been on reducing income inequality. This is of course a key problem, and women fare poorly on such measures.

The new Africa Human Development Report from the UN Development Programme (UNDP) on gender inequality estimates that the pay gap between African women and men is 30% - meaning women earn about 70% of what men do. It also calculates that the loss to Africa resulting from gender disparities in labour income amount to between $95 and $105 billion each year.

But ActionAid’s experience shows that reducing income inequality will not be enough to change women’s lives; laws and policies must also respond to the multiple and overlapping inequalities that affect them.

Significant among these are violence against women and girls (VAWG), the inequalities facing women in education, health, mobility in the community, obtaining decent paid work, unequal access to and control over land and resources, and women’s unpaid care burden (i.e. cooking, cleaning, collecting water and firewood in rural areas, taking care of the ill and elderly, and participating in community work, etc.).

What’s Holding Countries Back?

In our April 2016 report, The Price of Privilege, we show how powerful forces at the global level prevent countries from addressing inequalities.

In the full version of “Not Ready; Still Waiting” we examine blockages at the national level which prevent the establishment of laws and policies to reduce inequalities from being put in place. For example, social protection is widely recognised as a key redistributive policy with positive effects in reducing inequality, yet only two of the ten developing countries ActionAid studied, Brazil and South Africa, currently have comprehensive coverage.

Two examples of our findings on policy readiness – on social protection and equal pay legislation (both critical for addressing the unpaid care burden) are shown in the following box.

When quality legislation is in place, citizens have a tool with which they can more effectively demand government action. The complete data and reasoning for our overall conclusions can be found in the full report.

The Role of Rich Countries

The SDGs are universal, meaning that all countries should achieve all the goals. Beyond the developing countries studied, this report also looks at government readiness for SDG 17 in Australia, Denmark, the UK and the US, in terms of their global commitments.

The analysis was done using a composite indicator that ActionAid developed, incorporating trade, aid, tax, funding for women’s rights organisations, and business ethics. We also looked at countries’ commitments to climate change, and found that – in each area – developed countries were falling behind in their commitments.

For example, the US must increase its recent adaptation finance provision more than 60 times by 2020 and by 154 times by 2025, in order to meet the required funding level of $150bn by 2025.

On a more basic level, the fight against inequality requires that those who are “more equal” take steps to reduce the gap, but the richest countries continue to put developing countries at a disadvantage in order to protect their privileged positions.

Even as they talk about their commitment to development and reducing inequality, rich governments use tools ranging from tax treaties to self-serving “policy advice” to retain their advantages and prevent developing countries from reaching new opportunities.

Shifting Power

To improve their policy readiness to achieve the SDGs, civil society and national governments should:

Shift policy decision making power away from those who currently hold power and influence, including multilateral institutions, rich-country governments, elite groups, and multinational corporations, and towards developing country governments and their people.

Develop and hold governments accountable to redistributive national plans with policies that support the accomplishment of the SDGs. Such policies would aim to:

Recognise, redistribute and reduce women’s unpaid care work
improve opportunities for decent work and wages for women and young people

Increase women’s access to education and health
stop violence against women and girls

Improve women’s mobility, and their capacity to organise and participate in decision- making at all levels

Improve women’s access to education and health, and their access to and control over natural and economic resources.

Put in place appropriate systems, governance, financial support, and monitoring and evaluation programmes so policies can be designed with a genuine “feminist lens” insisting that women’s development potential be at the centre of analysis and decisions. Those systems should be implemented with sufficient information, infrastructure and budget, and rigorously monitored by women and girls who are given the power to hold decision-makers accountable.

From Communications and PR Unit, ActionAid Ghana

This is an overview of ActionAid’s second inequality report released on Thursday, 22nd September 2016 at the UN General Assembly in New York.