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Accelerating sustainable development in Africa: country lessons from applying integrated approaches

The Poverty-Environment Initiative of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Environment Programme (UNEP or UN Environment) launched a report on African countries’ progress in fostering coordinated and integrated approaches to development. The highlighted approaches connect and address poverty reduction, inequality, employment generation, climate change, environmental stress, and water, energy and food security. The report proposes five “pathways” to speed up and scale up integrated and participatory approaches to sustainable development and support achievement of the SDGs and Agenda 2063. The report titled, ‘Accelerating Sustainable Development in Africa: Country Lessons from Applying Integrated Approaches,’ finds that many African countries have already made progress in overcoming information and institutional barriers and fostering more coordinated and integrated approaches to development policy making, planning, budgeting, implementation and monitoring. The report reviews efforts related to integrated national development planning, cross-sector coordination for pro-poor environmental mainstreaming, decentralization for sustainable development, measurement of multidimensional change in poverty and environment, among others.