By Jesselina Rana, UN Advisor
The annual High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) brings together government officials, civil society, and UN agencies to assess progress on the SDGs. It is intended to go beyond reporting to identify what is working, what is failing, and what needs to change. Yet, there is a fundamental problem that strikes at the heart of SDG implementation but is too often left out of policy conversations – the growing restrictions on civil society that make advancing the Goals difficult and dangerous.
Civil society, from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots organizations to climate and environmental activists and human rights defenders, plays a key role in delivering services, generating data, and holding governments accountable for their SDGs commitments. In Colombia, the 2025 passage of the #SonNiñasNoEsposas (They are girls, not wives) bill, which banned child marriage, demonstrated the power of sustained civil society advocacy and offered renewed hope for SDG 5 on gender equality. In Nepal, local civil society played a critical role in making SDG monitoring more inclusive by ensuring representation of historically excluded communities and filling gaps in official statistics through citizen-generated and qualitative data.
Read on the SDG Knowledge Hub
