A new Afrobarometer Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Scorecard for Eswatini shows that the country has achieved gender equality in technology use.
The Afrobarometer SDG Scorecard, which provides citizens’ assessments of Eswatini’s progress over a recent five-year period on important aspects of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, also reveals that the country has made progress on access to infrastructure and partial progress on access to quality education and electricity.
But it is slipping on several indicators, including poverty, hunger, gender equality in financial control, as well as access to medical care and clean water. Unemployment has also worsened, and the gender gap in unemployment remains unchanged.
The newly developed Afrobarometer SDG Scorecards highlight citizens’ experiences and evaluations of their country’s performance on democracy and governance, poverty, health, education, energy supply, water and sanitation, inequality, gender equity, and other priorities reflected in 12 of the 17 SDGs. These citizen assessments can be compared to official UN tracking indicators. They present both summary assessments for each SDG – via blue, green, yellow, and red “stoplights” – as well as the data behind these assessments.
Afrobarometer, an independent pan-African survey research network, released scorecards for Eswatini and six other Southern African countries as part of a series of regional webinars focusing on progress toward the SDGs in Africa.
Speaking at the webinar, Dominique Dryding, Afrobarometer project manager for Southern Africa, said the Afrobarometer SDG Scorecards provide an additional perspective – one that is usually missing from other sources – that can be compared and contrasted with other indicators and thus enrich the discussion, help identify gaps, and support action to move forward in each country.
“The Afrobarometer SDG scorecards can be used as a complement to existing SDG trackers, by providing the people’s assessment of progress toward achieving the SDGs,” she said.
All scorecards can be accessed on the Afrobarometer website’s SDG Scorecards page.
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