United Nations Ranks Egypt First Place for Sustainable Development in the Arab World

Sustainability is a global effort. We all have to come together, as one, to help save the planet from ourselves. It's not a competition! THAT SAID... it's nice to be number one at something. And if the United Nations' Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) is to be believed, Egypt is in first place among Arab nations when it comes to implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), outscoring all the other countries in the region by 50 percent.

To clarify: the report is based on Arab national platforms who keep track of these SDGs, and only nine Arab countries have one of those. Although it's doubtful that a country that doesn't have their fingers on the pulse of their sustainable development is making many tracks in that area.

Egypt was one of the few countries that developed such a platform, which showed over 300 projects valued at about USD 25 billion overall. "Within the portfolio of the Ministry of International Cooperation with development partners, there is a huge number of projects in multiple and vital sectors," Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat said. "These include education, transportation, water desalination, new and renewable energy, entrepreneurship, empowerment of women, and other sectors that serve and work to achieve the 17 UN sustainable development goals."

Recently, the Ministry has been focusing on healthcare as a means to move towards these goals. "With more dialogue between policy makers, international finance and development institutions, private sector and civil society, we will leap forward in maximizing the health of our population as an investment in human capital to achieve the sustainable development goals," Al-Mashat said.