A Call to Action! Migration and the Post-2015 development agenda

Dear colleagues

I would like to renew our call to ensure that migrants and migration will become essential components of the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.

Governments are well underway in setting a set of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September.

Last year, a wide variety of European civil society organisations active in the area of migration and development addressed an Open Letter to the European Commission, the European Parliament and EU Member States calling for the inclusion of migrants and migration-related targets in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals agenda. The letter refers to the “Civil Society Stockholm Agenda” which has now been signed by 311 civil society organisations worldwide. The “Civil Society Stockholm Agenda” is still open for signatures by clicking here.

Negotiations are well underway and the months until the adoption of the post-2015 development agenda at the Special UN Summit on Sustainable Development in New York on September 25-27, 2015 will be crucial.

In that context, the MADE (www.madenetwork.org) Working Group on Global Governance of Migration and Development prepared a 4-page briefing paper entitled: “Migration and Sustainable Development Goals: a Post-2015 Call to Action”, which we hope will be a useful tool for any advocacy you may be conducting on that matter in your respective countries.

The paper:

• Provides a background as to why migrants and migration are important to development and have to be included in the new SDGs
• Describes the transition from the current MDG to a future SDG policy framework and the upcoming steps in this process.
  • Highlights our agenda for change, in particular the ‘Civil Society Stockholm Agenda’ and the proposals of integrating migrants and migration into the post-2015 goals and targets.
  • Includes important steps that you can take to come into action and mobilize support for this important civil society campaign.

The translations of this paper into French, Spanish and Turkish will be available next week.

We invite you to widely share this briefing within your organisations, your networks and with your partners. Please do not hesitate to contact my colleague Bob van Dillen, Coordinator of the MADE Working Group on Global Governance of Migration and Development (bob.van.dillen@cordaid.nl, governance@madenetwork.org or info@madenetwork.org) or me for any question you may have.