A new Afrobarometer Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Scorecard for Botswana shows that the country has made great progress toward SDG5 (gender equality). Men and women are essentially equal when it comes to financial control, and are moving toward equality in the use of mobile phones and the Internet.
The Afrobarometer SDG Scorecard, which provides citizens’ assessments of Botswana’s progress over a recent five-year period on important aspects of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, also reveals that the country is doing better on reducing poverty, hunger, and economic and ethnic inequalities, among others.
However, the country has slipped when it comes to access to medical care and clean water, reducing gender gaps in employment, and promoting institutional trust.
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 Botswana 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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