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The UN will convene a High-level Event on the MDGs in New York on 25 September 2008. At the halfway point towards the target date - and with hunger on the rise - new questions are being asked about their effectiveness.

Time to review the development goals

25th September 08 - Anne Perkins, The Guardian (UK)

It's assessment time, the halfway stage, for the Millennium Development Goals . Agreed at the United Nations in 2000, the target date for achieving the vast ambition of ending global poverty is 2015. Although there have been spectacular successes, particularly in south east Asia, there has been only slow and patchy progress elsewhere, while in sub-Saharan Africa, and in some former Soviet republics, the number of people in poverty has actually risen.

Today, 100 heads of government are meeting in New York to work out what needs to be done to boost the chances of reaching the eight goals that have been built around livelihoods, health and education.

Mid-global financial crisis, it's likely to be a lot harder than in 2005 to persuade donor countries to up the amount of aid they make available. It's already fallen from the all-time record of $107bn reached that year, to $104bn. Overseas aid always gets hard to sell when the going gets tough at home.

But that's not the only reason why support may weaken, despite the commitment of the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. The idea of setting fixed and prescriptive goals - with subsidiary targets that are supposed to offer waymarks to the final destination - has been controversial from the start, and evidence from the field in some cases backs up the scepticism.

The goals were established as global targets. But they are delivered, and measured (not always reliably), within individual countries. Some observers question whether the goals are distorting aid allocation, so that money goes to one country, or one project, that might be used more effectively - judged by poverty alleviation - in another.

In particular the individual targets are feared to be damagingly prescriptive. That could mean that money is diverted from the chronically to the merely slightly poor. And while early progress might be highly efficient in terms of aid use, striving, for example, to engage the last few per cent of children in full-time education could be disproportionately costly. Hence the new mantra: targets should be taken "seriously, but not literally".

Economists might invent some different way of measuring progress towards the targets that would allow more flexibility. But the greatest asset of the MDGs is their simplicity and their clarity. They have been invaluable as a way of focusing global attention and vision in high level politics - as this week's high level summit shows again - and mobilising public support and resources.

But that is more true for the rich north than the poor south. In some developing countries there is resentment at what's seen as the external imposition of targets that may not reflect local needs or desires. Insecurity - from civil war to theft and rape - is a fundamental cause of poverty, but it is not addressed at all by the MDGs.

Care International, in its recent report pointed out how vulnerable countries in conflict are. One in three child deaths and 29% of 12-year-olds who fail to complete primary school in developing countries live in so-called "fragile" states. Nearly one third of the world's poorest people live in countries in conflict, and progress on the goals to reduce extreme poverty and cut maternal mortality has gone backwards.

The Overseas Development Institute wants to develop the idea of the social protection, where humanitarian aid and development are woven together more closely. The real anxiety - when no country has yet reached the north's only MDG target of spending 0.7% of GDP on aid - is that in a climate of economic crisis, funding will fall more sharply.

Without renewed and redirected aid and energy, the MDGs will fail. Failure not only condemns millions to preventable illness and early death, it will also make it harder to engage and motivate the developed world in renewing its efforts.

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Failing the World’s Poor

23rd September 08 - The New York Times

Good intentions wither fast, especially when it comes to helping the world’s poor. 

At the turn of the millennium, world leaders committed to cutting extreme global poverty in half and to achieving deep reductions in malnutrition and child mortality rates. They followed that up in 2005 with a pledge to increase development assistance to $130 billion a year by 2010 (about $151 billion in today’s money).

That was then. Today, even as soaring energy and food prices exacerbate the suffering of the world’s poor, the richest nations are falling far behind on their aid commitments — and behind their past giving.

The current financial turmoil could make it even less likely that the wealthy nations will fulfill their promises to the poorest of the poor. Without that money, many of the development goals announced with such fanfare will go unmet.

Aid from the world’s developed countries fell by almost 13 percent between 2005 and 2007 — to under $104 billion, after inflation. The aggregate aid budget of the most developed nations amounts to 0.28 percent of their gross national income, woefully below the target of 0.7 percent agreed to by world leaders in 2002 .

Only Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark meet the target. Canada’s overseas aid amounts to 0.28 percent of its income. Japan’s is 0.17 percent. The United States, shamefully, is at the bottom of the list, spending 0.16 percent of its income on development assistance.

Many countries tie too many strings to their largess — such as requirements to buy supplies from donor countries. (Aid flows are often swayed by domestic politics in the donor nations, making them unpredictable and difficult to manage by receiving nations.)

Aid isn’t the only area where the developed world is failing. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, wealthy countries acknowledged that poverty can be a fertile ground for terrorism and pledged to open their markets to exports from the world’s poorest nations. Those promises collapsed along with global trade talks this year.

The world’s poor still desperately needs the help. According to a new World Bank study, 1.4 billion people lived in extreme poverty in 2005. Twenty-seven percent of children under 5 in the developing world were underweight. Their mortality rate was 83 per 1,000 live births, about 14 times the rate in rich nations. And whatever gains have been made against the most abject poverty, they risk being undone by the rising price of food.

Speaking to the United Nations this week, the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, warned that the world is facing a “development crisis,” and he expressed his fear that wealthy nations would now fall even further behind in their commitments. We share that fear.

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New MDG backed

24th September 08 - Oneworld.net

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which aim to halve world poverty by 2015, exclude millions of the poorest, most vulnerable and hardest to reach people on the planet, researchers from the Overseas Development Institute and Chronic Poverty Research Centre said today.

During the Call to Action on the MDGs, held in New York this week, the researchers are calling for social protection to be included in the goals to save the 400 million people trapped in chronic poverty, and to prevent more from slipping into long term poverty. This would mean investing to preserve people’s livelihoods and providing safety nets to protect vulnerable communities from shocks.

For the goals to succeed as a whole, half the world’s extreme poor should be able to access basic social assistance by 2015 and all poor people by 2025. Social protection is the foundation for access of the poorest to the health, education and other services critical for national economic, as well as social, development. This is a key issue, especially for the one in five of the world’s poor who live in extreme poverty, and who are most at risk from rising prices and from floods and droughts triggered by climate change.

There are three ways this crucial adjustment can be realised:

1) By the inclusion of a new Millennium Development Goal Goal – ‘Half the world’s extreme poor able to access basic social assistance by 2015 and all poor people by 2025’.

Targets - (i) 50% of the $1 a day poor (or children in extreme poor households) able to access basic social assistance by 2015 (ii) 95% of $2 a day poor people able to access basic social assistance by 2025.’

2) By the inclusion of a new target within an existing goal (e.g. MDG1)

Target - '50% of children in extreme poverty supported by social assistance programmes by 2015.'

3) By a new commitment within a revised Millennium Declaration

A new commitment recognising the importance of social protection, and especially social assistance in (i) achieving the MDGs; (ii) addressing the vulnerability of the extreme poor, the impossibility of escaping poverty and improving human capital levels for many without significant social assistance, and (iii) the importance of preventing the descent of more people into extreme poverty through social assistance. It would recommend that the international community continue to work with developing countries to put social assistance programmes in place and that countries develop their own goals, targets and indicators on social assistance.

Andrew Shepherd, a Director of Programmes at the ODI and Director of the CPRC, said:

“The Call to Action on the MDGs should affirm the will of member states to consider the role of social protection, and especially social assistance, in achieving MDGs 1 to 7. It should request the Secretary General to put in place a process which would generate an appropriate amendment to the MDGs by 2010.”

Salil Shetty, Director of the UN Millennium Campaign, said:

"Analysis of progress on the Millennium Development Goals to date has shown us clearly that once again, the most marginalized and excluded groups in society are not benefiting from our investments.

"The inclusion of women, indigenous people, lower castes, minorities and geographically excluded areas is crucial. Women’s rights and human rights need to be at the heart of our plans to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015."

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More information on ODI work on the MDG Call to Action is available here: http://www.odi.org.uk/odi-on/call-to-action-mdgs/index.asp  

24th September 08 - Kevin Watkins, The Guardian (UK)

As world leaders prepare to gather in New York for yet another UN summit on poverty, one question looms large: is there any point? The answer will depend on whether the meeting recycles old platitudes or sets out practical plans for combating deprivation, disease and illiteracy.

The summit is an attempt to renew support for the millennium development goals - the targets adopted for the reduction of global deprivation by 2015. They include cutting child deaths by two-thirds, the rate at which mothers die in childbirth by three-quarters, extreme poverty and malnutrition by half - and making available universal primary education.

With public attention locked on to the credit crisis, and rising energy and food costs, it's easy to lose sight of what's at stake: 10 million children die each year from preventable, poverty-related diseases; there are 1.4 billion people in the world surviving on less than $1.25 a day; and more than 70 million primary school-age children are out of school.

The development goals are supposed to be a sort of promissory note for the world's poor redeemable in 2015. But at the moment they have all the credibility of a sub-prime mortgage security.

Business-as-usual projections tell their own story. The gap between the pledges and projected outcome in 2015 is equivalent to 4.5 million child deaths, more than the entire under-five population of the UK. What can the UN summit do to change this picture? Rich countries need to stop talking and start delivering on aid and trade.

Three years ago at the Gleneagles G8 summit, countries promised a step increase in aid. Since then, aid flows have been stagnating, and research indicates developed countries are $30bn down on their commitments. And it's real money, not promises, that builds schools, pays health workers and funds pipes to carry clean water. The UN summit is an opportunity for recalcitrant donors to fulfil their promises.

Then there was Doha. This was supposed to be the trade talks' "development round". Rich countries were going to open their markets to the poorest and slash the farm subsidies that undermine developing countries' agricultural economies. In the event, the only thing that has been slashed is the credibility of the World Trade Organisation.

It would be too much to expect the UN summit to revive the corpse of Doha. But developed countries could provide full market access for the poorest countries in other regions. Listen to some millennium development goal enthusiasts and you'd think all that stands between the world and those targets is a lack of aid generosity and fairer trade rules. Sadly it's not. Developing country governments have much to answer for.

Take the case of India. For almost two decades the country has been in the premier league of world economic growth. Meanwhile, the child death toll is falling at less than half the rate needed to achieve the UN target. The economy might be booming, but 45% of India's children are still malnourished. India may be a world leader in delivering hi-tech computer services to global markets, but a public health system that saves children from diarrhoea? Forget it.

But there are positive examples too. In Brazil, the Bolsa Familia programme provides income transfers of $35 a month to 11 million of the poorest families. In return, they make a commitment to keep their children in school and take them for health checks. The scheme is reducing inequality, helping extend opportunity and breaking the transmission of poverty across generations. It's called redistributive social justice. It works - and more countries should try it.

Kevin Watkins is senior research fellow at Oxford University's global economic governance

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