SDG Spotlight: Goal 8

Sustained and inclusive economic growth can drive progress, create decent jobs for all and improve living standards.

In April 2020, the United Nations released a framework for the immediate socio-economic response to COVID-19, as a roadmap to support countries’ path to social and economic recovery. It calls for an extraordinary scale-up of international support and political commitment to ensure that people everywhere have access to essential services and social protection. The socio-economic response framework consists of five streams of work:

1. Ensuring that essential health services are still available and protecting health systems; 
2. Helping people cope with adversity, through social protection and basic services; 
3. Protecting jobs, supporting small and medium-sized enterprises, and informal sector workers through economic response and recovery programmes; 
4. Guiding the necessary surge in fiscal and financial stimulus to make macroeconomic policies work for the most vulnerable and strengthening multilateral and regional responses; and 
5. Promoting social cohesion and investing in community-led resilience and response systems.

These five streams are connected by a strong environmental sustainability and gender equality imperative to build back better. 

The UN Secretary-General has stressed that the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis must lead to a different economy.

Beyond the immediate crisis response, the pandemic should be the impetus to sustain the gains and accelerate implementation of long-overdue measures to set the world on a more sustainable development path and make the global economy more resilient to future shocks.