Whither the Millennium Development Goals?

May 24, 2010 Editorial

In September, the UN High level Plenary Meeting on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be convened. You do remember the MDGs, don’t you? Along with 188 other countries, we committed ourselves in 2000 to achieving by 2015 the MDG’s eight goals. In the words of the UN, the MDGs, “are the world’s quantified, time-bound targets for addressing extreme poverty, hunger and disease, and for promoting gender equality, education and environmental sustainability. They are also an expression of basic human rights: the rights of everyone to good health, education and shelter. The eighth Goal, to build a global partnership for development, includes commitments in the areas of development assistance, debt relief, trade and access to technologies.”

A decade has elapsed; we’re only five years away so it should be of some concern that there has been no comprehensive report as to how we’re doing. In the presentation of the Budget earlier this year, while the Finance Minister reiterated the government’s commitment towards the achievement of the MDG’s, he was not forthcoming about the present status of that commitment. It is our hope that we will not have a repetition in September of the recent fiasco at the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Report where the government’s representatives made their presentation of out Human Rights situation without any prior consultation with domestic actors and representatives.

We should realise by now that on matters that involve the entire populace, the government must reach not only beyond its own base to include the opposition elements but must move beyond the narrow political fraternity to include grass roots and other civil society elements that have demonstrated concerns about the agenda of the MDGs. In preparation for the September meeting, the UN has issued a report, “Keeping the promise” (KTP), which reminds the world that the majority of countries that signed on to the MDGs in 2000 will miss their targets by very wide margins in 2015. Are we one of those countries?

The report, in the section, “Key Success Factors”, highlights: “Civil society and community involvement and empowerment, which enhances the likelihood of success by giving individuals and communities the ability to take charge of their own lives.” This involvement is part and parcel of every goal encompassed by the MDGs.

The critical question today, KTP points out, is how to dramatically increase the pace of change on the ground in the remaining five years? It would appear that the government has already anticipated many of the KTP’s recommendations: “targeted, near-term, acceleration” interventions — such as subsidizing crucial agricultural inputs, immunization, eliminating user fees for education and health services and addressing human resource constraints in health… New technology-based solutions that did not exist when the Goals were endorsed, can and should be leveraged to allow for rapid scaling up. The most important of these technologies involve use of mobile telephones, broadband Internet, and other information and communications technologies.”

The LCDS as articulated by the government, within a national development and national competitiveness strategy appears also to be very prescient: “Interventions need to be framed in the context of national development strategies that define actions to ensure sustainability of the results in the long term… The very fact that the challenges of poverty, food, energy, global recession and climate change are all interrelated has presented the global community with a unique opportunity to tackle them together. The critical requirement for a “global green new deal” is a commitment by all to frontload large public investments in renewable energy in order to achieve economies of scale and learning, generate employment in both rich and poor countries, and lay the foundation for a new phase of global economic and technological advancement. Besides benefiting the poor, such investment would also lay the basis for sustainable development, stimulate complementary investments in infrastructure and agriculture, and help raise agricultural productivity, thus enhancing food security and creating decent jobs for the rural poor.”

The KTP presents the government with the opportunity to have the wider global community endorse its plans re: the MDGs. This gives it even greater incentive to initiate the widest consultations in the preparation of its report for the September meeting.

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Whither the Millennium Development Goals?

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