Financing the SDGs, Privatization, and Human Rights: A Discussion with Jeffrey Sachs and Philip Alston

Date: January 30, 2019, 6:00pm – 7:30pm
Location: Columbia Law School, Jerome Greene Hall, Room 104

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seek to provide a roadmap for all governments to eliminate extreme poverty and achieve a range of other key economic and social goals by 2030. However, financing to achieve these objectives, including the eradication of extreme poverty, currently falls trillions of dollars short. Achievement of the SDGs is at risk unless current finance trajectories can be shifted. Jeffrey Sachs, the Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General on the SDGs, and Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, discussed the relationship between finance, human rights, and the SDGs, including a focus on current trends toward privatization. Moderated by Brooke Guven, Legal Researcher, Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.

Video of the event is available here.

The audience benefited from reading the following publications:

Jeffrey Sachs, et. al., Closing the SDG Budget Gap (2018)

Philip Alston, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights on Privatization (2018)

Co-sponsored by CCSI, the Columbia SIPA MPA in Development Practice Program, the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, RightsLink, and the Human Rights Institute.