The Expert group for Child Mortality is the The UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (IGME) see www.childmortality.org/

That is one of the relatively easy SDG expert bodies to find!

This UN Stats group indicator document gives a list of all the expert groups for most of the proposed indicators (to be fair, a lot of them are UN organisations, but I think many are having discussions with other interested groups as per the JMP too) docs.google.com/file/d/0B8n3WhOaTbGVZ3JIbUQ4QlFWYjQ/view?pli=1

Ah, that's very interesting!
I checked where soil would be in the SDGs, and I guess it's part of this one, right?:

15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

I see some overlap here with the reuse aspects of sanitation ("reverse land degradation").

Do you happen to know which is the equivalent to JMP in the SDG on child mortility? I guess that's this one now, which seems to combine the former MDGs on child mortality and maternal mortality:

3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

It could be interesting to see if they (the experts and "lobbyists" of the other topics) have similar discussion forums to ours and are also busy discussing indicators for their goals, like we do for "our goal" number 6:

6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

(for ease of access, I have copied the goal descriptions out of the Wikipedia article on SDGs, assuming that it contains the latest wording)

When I went to the UN Water meeting in Spain a while back, the delegates were keen to discuss how Water (and by association sanitation) is a cross-cutting idea which featured directly or indirectly in most of the 17 goals.

But then I also covered Global Soil Week who were keen to say that... soil was a cross-cutting idea which featured directly or indirectly in most of the 17 goals.

I think, in fact, almost anything can be considered to be a cross-cutting idea which cuts across all the others.

As far as I can see, the difficulty is that this leaves quite a of "cross-cutting" ideas promoted by their own NGOs and professional bodies (in our case, that's the JMP, but there are equivalents in all the other fields) - and inevitable battles for which are the "most important" cross-cutting ideas and which issues take precedence over the others.

I'm not quite sure how to get a handle of it all..

I am very pleased that this thematic discussion series is taking place and would like to thank all experts and participants already now for their time!

I have a general question which did not fit into any of the four themes so I have started this thread. The same thread can also be used by others who have a general question about this thematic discussion.

My question is:
Are we going to look at any of the other SDGs as well? We always say that many of the SDGs somehow relate to sanitation but could we take a closer look? Could we perhaps even reach out to the experts behind those other SDGs and invite them to comment here? I am thinking of SDGs related to health and gender equality for example (but there might be more).

This is also something that irked me with the MDGs. I felt very well informed about progress with MDG 7 thanks to the JMP reports which I read regularly. But I didn't even really know where to find information about the other MDGs (in particular the one about child mortality, which equivalent organisation to JMP was monitoring that one?). Also publications that pulled everything together to show differences in achievement levels for the whole suite of MDGs would be useful. I am sure they exist somewhere but they were never really pointed out to us...

Also, if we think about SDGs intensely during this thematic discussion, how about also taking a look at the Wikipedia article on the SDGs and figuring out what needs to be done to improve it?
Here is the link to the article:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals

Here is the link to the article's talk page where you can suggest improvements:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sustainable_Development_Goals

Big thank you to Joe Turner who's already been improving the SDG article quite a bit since March of this year.

Regards,
Elisabeth