Yesterday, as an NGO with a Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, Gede submitted a written statement in response to ECOSOC’s call for NGO reflections on the theme – “Managing the transition from Millennium Development Goals to the sustainable development goals: what will it take?” Gede’s submission focused on two themes – (i) the need for SDGs to ensure that the cross-cutting nature of all social problems is fully acknowledged (in turn, avoiding the silo-thinking and funding which has tended to dominate the MDGs), and, (ii) the need for all development agencies to identify genuine core competencies as rigorously defined by analysts such as Hamel and Prahalad, rather than (as more often than not) as more lazily defined by NGOs themselves. The submission will be published on Gede’s website following the ECOSOC deadline of April 24 2015