 This ceremony marks the culmination of a process which began in 2016 for monitoring and evaluating the progress made in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals in Nigeria. The grand ambition of the SGGs, as we know and as we've heard again today, is to engender an economically sustainable, socially inclusive and environmentally resilient world. For Nigeria and indeed Africa as a whole, the achievement of the SGGs is crucial to our the task of ending poverty, hunger, disease and safeguarding our environment. And for our administration, our objective of achieving sustainable development, which means creating wealth, decent jobs, reducing poverty, addressing the issues of climate change, is both consistent with the aspirations of the SGGs and central to our entire vision for the country. This is why in May 2019, Mr. President made a public commitment to lifting approximately 100 million Nigerians out of poverty within a 10-year period. This is a national developmental priority, which again follows on the establishment of our Social Protection Program. And our Social Protection Program, the Social Investment Program, is the largest on the continent and which by itself is an attempt to accelerate the achievement of the SGGs across the country. The program is a multi-pronged approach to wealth creation, human capacity development and poverty alleviation. The conditional cash transfer program is the component of the program which reaches approximately 8.9 million poor and vulnerable households and 37.7 million individuals across the country. The Government Enterprises and Empowerment Program, GEEP, has provided about 2.4 million loans to petty traders and small entrepreneurs worth 38 billion across the country. While the N-Power Program, which is a youth employment and skills enhancement initiative, is designed to employ 1 million youths between the ages of 18 and 35 and further enskill them for the job market over a two-year period. As a successful plan for the millennium development goals, the Nigeria SGGs Indicator Baseline Report 2016 reinforced the need to strengthen our national statistical system to enable effective tracking and monitoring of the SGGs that we're all committed to. But it's a matter of some regret that just as we were commencing the decade of action for SGGs and had started seeing some modest progress, especially in the areas of poverty reduction, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged to undermine the prospects of achieving our aspirations. The pandemic, as we all know, resulted in an unprecedented global disruption of economies. While welfare countries were able to effectively fund massive stimulus programs and social protection schemes to deal with the impact of the pandemic, developing countries, including Nigeria, suffered disproportionately due to resource constraints. But yet it is to the credit of the SDG, especially our office, that despite the restrictions occasioned by the COVID-19 outbreak, our SDG's office in Nigeria succeeded in putting in place effective institutional mechanisms at the national and sub-national levels to drive the implementation of the SDGs across the country. And during this difficult period, Nigeria successfully presented its second voluntary national review reports on the SDGs to the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development sometime in July 2020. The 2020 voluntary national review process was conducted by the deployment of ICT platforms to conduct virtual consultations, as we've heard, across all the key segments of society. The key findings identified the major successes as well as the challenges that must be addressed if we must achieve the SDGs by the year 2030. There's no question that the Nigeria SDGs implementation plan, 2020 to 2030, offers a coherent pathway for achieving the expected outcomes in the next decade. One of the areas of marked improvement in this document that we're presenting is the increased range of reporting from the 126 indicators recorded in the 2016 baseline report to the 141 indicators in the current 2020 report. So broadening the spectrum of data that is covered by the report gives a more accurate picture of what is going on and can help shape a more accurate or more accurate policy responses. The launch today both completes and officially initiates the process of realigning the national statistical system with requirements of the SDGs. And it is, as we've heard, a product of the data mapping exercise and the design and execution of the SDG data bond. The federal government is committed to guaranteeing the sustained production of relevant statistical information that is needed for effectively tracking and monitoring SDGs in Nigeria. And so we fully support the partners in this important enterprise, namely the office of the senior special assistant to the president on sustainable development goals, the national bureau of statistics and the entire national statistical system. With this launch, we'll be able to track our progress on the SDGs accurately on an annual basis. Also, as this report itself observes, in order for the SDGs to be truly sustainable, they must be integrated into plans and policies of government. And this is precisely the approach that we have taken, beginning from the economic recovery and growth plan 2017 to 2020, the national poverty reduction with growth strategy, and then the economic sustainability plan, which of course, as you know, was a short-term response to the adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. And now the national development plan 2021 to 2025, which was approved by the federal executive council only a couple of weeks ago. Its core components include human capital development, infrastructure and social development, all of which are vehicles for achieving the SDGs. But more specifically, the national development plan identifies as areas of emphasis and action, agriculture, food security, rural development, water resources, enhancement, sanitation, social protection and health and nutrition. These thematic areas, as you'll observe, mirror the SDGs and anchor the national development plan very tangibly on the achievement of the goals of the SDGs themselves. Our approach ensures that the SDGs are central to our national development efforts, and are indeed policy priorities for the foreseeable future. Clearly, all of these policy and planning documents bear the imprint of the SDGs as overarching national priorities. So let me conclude by commenting again the senior specialist assistant to the president on SDGs, Princess Adejioke Ureloquia de Fulure, for her passion and commitment to the enormous task of meeting our SDG commitments, and again to her and the statistician general of the Federation Dr. Simon Harry, for your leadership in this very important process. In presenting this strategic report to Nigerians and the international community, I will urge all stakeholders to pay close attention to its key findings and recommendations, with a view to strengthening the implementation of the SDGs in Nigeria. I must now, in a moment or so, invite you to join me to witness the presentation of the report on the review of baseline and realignment of the national statistical system with SDGs 2020. And I'll ask that you witness this. I'll be inviting, I think, some of the personalities, development partners, the statistician general, and of course the SDG, the national coordinator of the SDGs, to join me as we unveil the report. I thank you very much for your kind attention.