Month: May 2020

Each year, during the month of May, RACI opens its membership for all those organizations that wish to join a cooperative workspace. Today, more than ever, we want to stay together in order to face the challenges before us and to work together to be able to succeed.

The necessary requirements that organizations must meet in order to join our Member Network are the following:

• Be a non-governmental, non-partisan, nonprofit organization.
• Be an organization with a social cause, that is, to have been constituted to carry out an activity in pursuit of the common good, democratically organized, whose financial resources are used to help pursue its own objectives.
• Be an Argentine organization that works in the country.
• Be registrated under Argentine legal regulations, in any of the forms that the law provides for non-profit organizations (civil organizations, foundations, cooperatives, cooperation organizations, mutual organizations, etc.).
• Have a minimum of 2 years of operation, since its legal registration.
• Participate in the Informative Membership Meeting or have had a previous meeting with the RACI staff.

RACI considers that working collectively is the best way to tackle, with an integral approach, the problems of the country and the world. For this reason, the Network works on issues of advocacy, research and capacity development to democratize the access to tools, methodologies, information and resource, in order to produce and spread valuable information for civil society and to develop and optimize CSO capacities and skills.

Being a member of RACI means being part of a diverse group of Argentine civil society organizations that works together and in pursuit of an independent, solid and sustainable civil society. RACI members actively participate in exchange spaces, during which they connect with each other in order to protect the civil space and improve the enabling environment of the civil society.

The entry process consists of filling in the following form and following the instructions given there. For any questions, please write to: membresia@raci.org.ar.

In our website www.raci.org.ar you can find more information on our work, what our courses of action are, who our members are, the strategic actors with whom we build bridges, our projects and much more. We invite you to join our Network!

As the first five years of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda have gone by, it is time to bring back to the table questions and answers about what the countries of the Global South really need to comply with the SDGs while carrying out their own agenda of development. The latest study by Southern Voice and FUSADES on the process of implementation of the SDGs in Latin America and the report by Marcela Morales, Estefanía Charvet and Andrea Ordóñez, also from Southern Voice, provided several lines of reflection to think about the decisive decade that will begin.

Recent progress has shown that it is no longer sufficient to develop individual capacities if they are not combined with structures of support. For a long time, development has been equated to meeting individual needs, and as a result, many policies and programs were thought out and implemented with the same approach. Currently, what we require is a better interaction between individual and collective capacities, understanding the latter as the real available opportunities for a group, community, or country.

As we begin the most critical decade for the implementation of the SDGs, it is imperative to transform the 2030 Agenda framework from a list of disconnected objectives and targets to a more holistic plan of action. But even a well-integrated and coherent national policy is not enough to achieve this; a global perspective is required. The focus on integrated development and the ambition of the 2030 Agenda requires strengthening or building partnerships between governments, different sectors of society, and international cooperation. This is recognized as a part of SDG 17, which emphasizes the need to encourage participation and partnerships involving the public and private sector, civil society, and other stakeholders at the local, national, regional, and global level. For Latin America, the integrated nature of the 2030 Agenda provides a particularly relevant framework for addressing the multidimensional approaches needed to break the traps of development, which prevent middle-income countries from moving to higher levels of development, and turning them into opportunities to achieve this.

The production of indicators and the monitoring and following of the prioritized objectives are critical to ensure that the strategies are achieving the desired results. It is also a mechanism for implementing the “Leave no one behind” principle. By using data, countries can identify those that need more attention. Therefore, a key purpose of data collection for monitoring and evaluation is to ensure accountability and evidence-based policy-making to achieve the 2030 Agenda. Latin America faces the challenge of strengthening data and information systems to improve access to quantitative and qualitative data sources on SDG objectives and indicators. It is also important to find out what data should be collected and how it can be analyzed to understand the needs and expectations of each group.

Over the past two decades, poverty and inequality In Latin America has declined. As a result, the middle class has grown in size. Higher incomes come with higher expectations. People demand better public policies, services, and institutions, and they cannot respond. Citizens perceive a disconnect between their needs and the response of the government. In addition, numerous cases of corruption fuel popular discontent, which diminishes the trust in institutions. That is why the Agenda 2030 is so important for Latin America, it simultaneously focuses on the three dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social, and environmental).

In summary, the researchers suggest the need for structural transformation in order to address development-related problems in the countries of the Global South is raised through an inclusive perspective, focused on the development of collective capacities, to build long-term policies that support the transformations needed to achieve the 2030 agenda.

For more information, visit http://southernvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/200122-Summary-LATAM-FINAL.pdf y http://southernvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Collective-Capabilities.pdf