The COVID 19 started in most countries with the announcement of an unprecedented public lockdown.
During this session the second part was devoted to looking at the actual governmental actions and decisions, and indicating whether these were having a positive or negative impact categorised by the 17 SDG goals (sustainable development goals). In the limited time we have we could not go through all of the SDGs unfortunately, but the exercise was a really interesting one.
It appeared clearly that basic action on SDG 3 - health pandemic, created a pressure on different social elements , and relieved pressure on other SDGS related to the biosphere. Responses to it were quite different like in Portugal providing a citizenshipmigrants to protect all. The response of the Belgian Government overall was one of crisis management ans risk assessments. The participants saw civil society taking the lead on a lot of mitigation actions, and government only responding to it late. Anyway, it is an interesting picture of going into lockdown. Other SDG impact highlights will for sure be needed during the lockdown and the strategies to go out of it, like which sector to save and which not. Here is the PDF version of the results, work in progress.
In the first part of the meetup of 2/4 a quick call around the participants noted that:
- digital transformation initiatives were quickly reprioritised as whole work force moved to teleworking
- some administrations just did not adapt, and moved a lot of services or appointments to later
administrations organised first internally ( connectivity, well- being) and than moved to digital public services