Millennium Development Goals: Overall Success is Far from Assured

Photos by Adam
Rogers/UNCDF

Halfway to a 2015 deadline, there has been clear progress towards implementing the Millennium Development Goals, a set of global commitments to lift millions of people out of extreme poverty. But their overall success is still far from assured, a progress report by the United Nations has found.

“The results presented in this report suggest that there have been some gains and that success is still possible in most parts of the world,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declares in the foreword to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, which was launched in Geneva on July 2. “But they also point to how much remains to be done.”

There has been significant progress toward the target of halving extreme poverty by 2015, the report found, noting that the proportion of people worldwide living on the equivalent of a dollar a day has dropped from 32 per cent (1.25 billion in 1990) to 19 per cent (980 million in 2004).

If that trend continues, the report estimates, “the MDG poverty reduction target will be met for the world as a whole and for most regions.” It added that it found reason for hope in the fact that some progress is being made “even in those regions where the challenges are greatest.” For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, the number of desperately poor people has “leveled off,” and the region’s poverty rate has fallen by nearly six percentage points since 2000.

Yet, while the proportion of people living on one dollar a day or less sub-Saharan Africa has declined from 45.9 per cent to 41.1 per cent since 1999 and, the rising number of extreme poor has levelled off, reaching the MDG target of halving the extend of extreme poverty by 2015 requires that the current pace is nearly doubled.

At the same time, the report says, a number of African countries are demonstrating that rapid, wide-scale progress towards the MDGs is possible when strong government leadership, sound policies and practical strategies for promoting public investments are combined with adequate financial and technical support from the international community.

There is also positive news from Asia, where rapid economic growth has put the region comfortably on track to achieve the MDG poverty target.

The report also cites these other signs of progress:

More children in developing countries are going to school. Enrolment in primary education in developing countries rose from 80 per cent in 1991 to 88 per cent in 2005.

Women’s struggle for equal rights has gained ground as a result of their growing involvement in politics and government, but progress overall has been slow.

MBARGO Until 2 July 2007 12:01 a.m. local time

Child mortality has declined worldwide, in large part because of effective and inexpensive interventions to save children from such threats as measles.

There has been a major expansion of key interventions to control malaria.

The tuberculosis epidemic is on the verge of decline, although progress has not been fast enough to put the world on track to meet the target of halving prevalence and death rates by 2015. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, causing profound climate changes that threaten human well-being. But there has been progress in the development of sustainable energy technologies.

But there is another side to the statistics cited in the report, and they paint a far less encouraging picture. The report found that the most impressive reductions in extreme poverty were in Southern, Southeastern and Eastern Asia. But in Western Asia, the poverty rate more than doubled during the same period. And despite the gains in sub-Saharan Africa, that region’s poverty gap remains the highest in the world.

Other severe problems also remain, according to the report. Over half a million women die annually of preventable and treatable complications in pregnancy and childbirth; there has been little progress in halving the proportion of underweight children; and AIDS deaths worldwide rose to 2.9 million last year from 2.2 million in 2001, while more than 15 million children have lost one or both parents to the disease.

Moreover, half the population of the developing world still has no access to basic sanitation, and the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change are already being felt. Among the reasons for the lack of progress is that the benefits of economic growth are not being equally shared, the Secretary-General writes. Also in some countries, efforts to meet the MDGs are being undermined by insecurity and instability caused by such factors as armed conflict and HIV/AIDS.

The UN chief also pointed to the failure of most developed countries to live up to their commitments to provide “adequate financing within the global partnership for development and its framework for mutual accountability.” “In particular,” the Secretary-General says in the report’s foreword, “the lack of any significant increase in Official Development Assistance since 2004 makes it impossible, even for well-governed countries, to meet the MDGs.”

The leading industrial nations pledged to double aid to Africa by 2010 at their meeting in Gleneagles in 2005, but total official aid declined in real terms by 5.1 per cent between 2005 and 2006. Only five donor countries have reached or exceeded the United Nations target of allocating 0.7 per cent of their Gross National Income for aid.

Increasing financial aid may not be the only way to help underdeveloped countries to catch up with the pace of globalisation. There is also a strong case for there to be a fundamental shift in the allocation of aid away from ‘countries’ towards global initiatives that will directly benefit the people wherever they may be found.

“By reducing the amounts of aid to specific countries, and increasing them to appropriate global initiatives we can make globalisation really work for the poor”, comments Tim Unwin, who is Director of the World Economic Forum's Partnerships for Education programme with UNESCO and UNESCO Chair in ICT4D, “Indeed, there is a growing awareness among African leaders of the dangers of ‘aid-reliance’, and an increased determination to develop their own internal solutions to many of the difficulties that their countries face”, he continues.

Unwin, who in a recent publication* points to the immense danger in simply increasing the amounts of aid available to African countries, argues that currently there is not the human capacity there to be able to deliver it appropriately and sustainably in the interest of poor people. Providing education on all levels, starting with all-encompassing primary education, up to secondary education and sufficient higher education capacities can help ensure that African countries can in the future dispose of the human capacities to absorb substantially increased amounts of aid.

There has been a progress towards universal primary education, with enrolment increasing from 57 per cent in 1999 to 70 per cent in 2005 - but a gap of 30 per cent remains. The number of school children is increasing daily in Africa and expected to reach 403 million in 2015.

The UN Millenium Development Goal Report 2007 is available at
http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/mdg2007.pdf.

* Unwin, Tim (2007): No end to poverty, Journal of Development Studies, 43:5, 929-953. Link

(Sources: UN.org, ICWE)

For further reading on the MDG’s and the international debate on development issues we recommend:

Commission for Africa (2005) Our Common Interest. Report of the Commission for Africa (London: Commission for Africa).

Easterley, W. (2006b) The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and so Little Good (New York: Penguin).

Fine, B. and Jomo, K.S. (2006) The New Development Economics: Post Washington Consensus Neoliberal Thinking (London: Zed Press).

Friedman, T.L. (2006) The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin).

Kothari, U. (2006) A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies (London: Zed Press).

Sachs, J. (2005) The End of Poverty: How we Can Make it Happen in Our Lifetime (London: Penguin Books).

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