Volume 20: Issue 1 (2024)

COVID-19, the SDG Agenda, and Implementation Paralysis: Cash Transfer Programs to the Rescue?

Nandini Ramanujam, Nicholas Caivano, Alexander Agnello, & Kassandra Neranjan

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified global development needs and widened the funding gap for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The SDG Agenda, which represents the global commitment to achieving the SDGs, necessitates that implementation be cohesive and non-selective, ensuring that the goals are not treated as discrete entities but rather as interlinked objectives to be pursued simultaneously for the Agenda’s full realization. However, we argue that responding to specific pandemic-driven development deficits requires recognizing limits to SDG indivisibility. By analyzing the pandemic’s impact on food security (SDG 2) and primary and secondary education (SDG 4), we show how the widespread erosion of development progress on these goals threatens the Agenda as their attainment forms a foundation for durable progress on other SDGs. Cash transfer programs designed to address erosions of development progress could provide some direction in moving beyond the rigidity of non-selective realization and SDG implementation paralysis.