foreword
Unity will win
With a calendar date that will go down in history as marking the official end of the COVID-19 pandemic – the most simultaneously-felt global disruption since World War II – 2023 should have been a year of pure optimism. Instead, it marked a time in which very little felt safe, secure, or straightforward. Conflict proliferated – from Sudan to Ukraine to Gaza – with the highest number of conflicts worldwide in eighty years. Incredible technological advances exposed their own weaknesses: artificial intelligence-powered misinformation was considered the world’s biggest short-term threat by the business community and the cloud generated a bigger carbon footprint than the airline industry. Important development advances were overshadowed by pervasive inequalities: the gender gap in education narrowed, with some glaring exceptions like Afghanistan, and yet women had equal legal rights to men in only 14 countries in the world.
This was the complex, uncertain context in which UNDP operated in 2023, with multilateralism in a deep state of flux. Throughout, however, we held that international cooperation was deflated, not defeated. The green shoots of development were also visible. A new, highly effective malaria vaccine; a boom of investment in renewable energy overtaking fossil fuel investment for the first time; a doubling since 2021 of the number of countries making scientific knowledge, infrastructure, and data freely accessible to all. Though progress against targets remained stubbornly off track, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) gained traction: three-quarters of investors tracked their investments using the SDGs, a modest but hopeful improvement on previous years.
The people that I met in the course of my travels last year inspired me to redouble our efforts as UNDP: the officials we worked with to raise funds and ideas in the aftermaths of the catastrophic floods in Pakistan and the devastating earthquake in Türkiye; the ecosystem of insurance companies, politicians, sailors and activists that helped to save the FSO SAFER tanker off the coast of Yemen and – against all the odds – avoid a potentially catastrophic environmental disaster in the Red Sea; the innovators and entrepreneurs that I met in Rwanda, a nation that 29 years ago had lost all reason for hope, now creating its future.
Read moreDevelopment for all
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