Will the SDGs and UN Decade of Healthy Ageing leave older people behind?

Vera-Sanso, Penny (2023) Will the SDGs and UN Decade of Healthy Ageing leave older people behind? Progress in Development Studies 23 (4), pp. 391-407. ISSN 1464-9934.

Abstract

Since the 1950s, multi-national institutions have taken a number of positions towards population ageing and later life. In 1994, the World Bank (WB) saw population ageing as a crisis that needed "averting". The United Nations (UN) approach evolved from the individualized, compassionate ageism of 1981 to a developmental, ‘society for all ages’, perspective in 2002. Yet the UN made comparatively little headway. In 2021 the UN launched its Decade of Healthy Ageing to support the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda’s ‘leave no one behind’ goal. The UN rightly sees ageing as a lifelong, societal and developmental process and strongly supported the evidence that unequal resource distribution is the main contributor to health inequalities across the life span. Despite this evidence, the focus is now on a bio-medical framing of impaired health and on a multi-stakeholder approach that emphasises the Silver Economy’s economic potential. The first two years of the Decade saw significant efforts to generate private sector support. While the Decade of Healthy Ageing is still young, there is much good, harm, and missed opportunity that can happen in a decade, justifying early consideration of what the Silver Economy bio-medical approach will do for older people in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs).

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