The Global Goalkeeper Award is given by
- (a)the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
- (b)the United Nations Environment Programme
- (c)the Kellogg School of Management
- (d)the World Meteorological Organization
Correct — A, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Goalkeepers is an initiative the Gates Foundation launched in 2017 to press for progress on the Sustainable Development Goals, and it hands out a set of Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards each September, timed to the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The Global Goalkeeper Award is the senior of them, given to a leader for driving progress on the Goals, and it sits alongside the Changemaker, Campaign and Progress awards, which recognise young leaders, advocacy and measurable improvement. In 2019 the Global Goalkeeper Award went to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the Swachh Bharat Mission's sanitation drive, a decision that was itself publicly contested. The other three options are all real institutions, but none of them runs this award.
- (b)the United Nations Environment Programme — UNEP has its own honour, the Champions of the Earth award, which is the UN's highest environmental distinction. It is not the Goalkeepers programme, which belongs to a private foundation.
- (c)the Kellogg School of Management — A business school at Northwestern University. It confers academic and alumni distinctions, not a global development award tied to the Sustainable Development Goals.
- (d)the World Meteorological Organization — A specialised agency of the United Nations dealing with weather, climate and water. Its recognitions are scientific, such as the IMO Prize, and unconnected to this award.
The Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015 set seventeen targets for 2030, and a good deal of the machinery that tracks them sits outside the United Nations system. The Gates Foundation's Goalkeepers report and event are part of that machinery: an annual data report on progress towards the Goals, an event held in New York during the General Assembly week, and a set of awards used to draw attention to particular efforts.
Two of the three wrong options can be discarded by asking what each body actually does — a business school and a weather agency are not in the business of development awards. That leaves UNEP as the only serious rival, and the distinguishing fact is that UNEP's flagship honour is Champions of the Earth, a different award with a different name. Anchor the item to the exam: the 2019 award to the Indian Prime Minister for the Swachh Bharat Mission was the reason this question appeared in a February 2020 paper. Be careful in stating the achievement — the award citation rested on the sanitation campaign, and claims about open defecation being eliminated have been contested since, so it is safer to describe the award than to certify the outcome.
- Goalkeepers is an initiative of the Gates Foundation, launched in 2017 to accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.
- The Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards are presented each September in New York during the United Nations General Assembly week.
- The award categories include the Global Goalkeeper, Changemaker, Campaign and Progress awards.
- The 2019 Global Goalkeeper Award was given to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the Swachh Bharat Mission.
- UNEP's own flagship environmental honour is Champions of the Earth, which is a different award.
- Assuming any award connected with the Sustainable Development Goals must come from a United Nations body.
- Confusing the Global Goalkeeper Award with UNEP's Champions of the Earth.
- Treating the award citation as an independent verification of the outcome it praises.
As an award-to-conferring-body identification, or as a matching set of international awards and the organisations behind them.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
'Champions of the Earth', the highest environmental honour of the United Nations, is conferred by
- (a)the United Nations Environment Programme
- (b)the World Meteorological Organization
- (c)the Gates Foundation
- (d)the World Bank
Answer(a) the United Nations Environment Programme — a different award from the Gates Foundation's Global Goalkeeper Award, and a frequent distractor for it.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Goalkeepers initiative, which publishes an annual report on progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, was launched in which year?
- (a)2010
- (b)2015
- (c)2017
- (d)2020
Answer(c) 2017 — two years after the Goals themselves were adopted in 2015.