|
|
|
|
Millennium Development Goals In the year 2000 the world decided to launch a concerted attack on poverty and the problems of illiteracy, hunger, discrimination against women, unsafe drinking water and a degraded environment. Meeting at the United Nations at the dawning of the new millennium, leaders from virtually every country in the world came together and formulated eight ambitious goals to help relieve the massive debt and poverty crippling the developing countries of the world. The goals are as follows: 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development
The Millennium Goals grew out of the Millennium Declaration enunciated by the United Nations in 2000. They bind countries to do more and join forces in the fight against poverty, illiteracy, and hunger. The eighth goal, reaffirmed in Monterrey and Johannesburg, calls on rich countries to relieve debt, increase aid and give poor countries fair access to their markets and their technology. The Millennium Goals are a test of political will to build stronger partnerships. Developing countries have the responsibility to undertake policy reforms and strengthen governance to liberate the creative energies of their people. But they cannot reach the Goals on their own without new aid commitments, equitable trading rules and debt relief. The Goals offer the world a means to accelerate the pace of development and to measure results. Goal One--the Challenge: In the developing world an estimated 1.2 billion people survive on less than $1 day, 800 million are undernourished and 153 million children under age five are underweight. In sub-Saharan Africa half the population lives in poverty. Goal Two—the Challenge: An estimated 114 million children of primary age in the world are not enrolled in school, depriving one in every five children of access to even the most basic education. Goal Three—the Challenge: An estimated 63 million primary age girls are still not enrolled in school. And in only 9 countries in the world are 1 in 3 or more seats in parliament held by women. Goal Four—the Challenge: Nearly 11 million children under the age of 5 die in the world every year—well over 1,200 every hour, most from easily preventable or treatable causes. Goal Five—the Challenge: Globally, some 500,000 women die in pregnancy or childbirth each year, one every minute. Over her lifetime, a woman in sub-Saharan Africa faces a 1-in-16 chance of dying in childbirth, compared with 1-in-160 in Latin America and the Caribbean and 1-in-840 in eastern Asia. In developed countries the risk is 1-in-2800. Goal Six—the Challenge: HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death in sub-Saharnan, Africa and worldwide, the fourth killer. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected region, but other regions, including South Asia, the CIS and the Caribbean are experiencing rapid increases in the incidence of HIV/AIDS. Goal Seven—the Challenge: Around 2.4 billion people do not have access to improved sanitation and some 1.2 billion do not have access to an improved source of water. Goal Eight—the Challenge: Pledges to increase development assistance should be honored and progress on relieving the debt burdens of poor nations needs to be stepped up. The promise of the Doha round of international trade negotiations should be fulfilled, including the reduction of agricultural subsidies, which place farmers of developing countries in a disadvantage in the world market. Implementation of the Principle of Sharing To realize the Goals across the board, developing countries will need at least $100 billion a year in ODA (official development assistance), according to a number of studies. Since the Millennium Summit, ODA has grown from just over $50 billion a year to $68 billion in 2003—a substantial increase, but still far short of estimated needs and representing a bare one-quarter of one percent of donor countries’ overall annual income. 2005 is proving a critical five-year review period of the progress made in the implementation of the Millennium Declaration. “Overcoming poverty,” as Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “will require a quantum leap in scale and ambition: more nationally owned strategies and policies, stronger institutions, wider participatory processes, focused investments in economic and social infrastructure, and more resources, external and internal. Realistically, if the goals are to be reached, these developments need to happen very soon. We must seize the opportunity.” The realization of Goal Eight is especially vital to the success of the entire MDG effort because it could facilitate the successful implementation of all the others. Part of the problem confronting the poor countries of the world has been debt relief. Many of them have fallen into a debt trap and, fortunately, many individuals, organizations and nations have come to understand that debt relief is one of the most important goals in the effort to “make poverty history.” The movement for debt relief was spear-headed by the 70,000 demonstrators in 1998 at the Birmingham G8, who surrounded the summit demanding an end to the debt crisis. The demonstrators said they would no longer support a situation in which for every £l given in aid, £3 went for debt repayment. Their efforts eventually proved successful. It led the U.K. government to cancel 100% of the debt owed by many of the poorest countries. Now the U.K. government has gone even further and agreed to cover its share of the debt service paid to the World Bank and African Development Bank by some countries. A promise was made and the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative was initiated. It was supposed to free the poorest countries from their crippling debt burdens, and ensure that no poor country was burdened with an unpayable debt. The realization of this goal has been very different. In fact, little more than 10% of the total debt owed by the world’s poorest countries has been cancelled—prior to the most recent development that was achieved in June 2005. During that time the GI finance ministers struck a deal to scrap immediately 40 billion dollars of multilateral debt owed by 18 of the world’s poorest countries. The agreement on debt relief was the endorsement of proposals which arose from White House talks between US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a prelude to the July G8 summit in Scotland. The G8 proposal relieves the debt of 18 poor nations (many in Africa) at a rate of from $1 billion to $2 billion per year which is small related to the resources that are expended. There is, however, research that cautions that debt relief, while encouraging, is not enough as it will be unlikely to result in large gains for poor countries. As Stanford Associate Professor of Economics Peter Henry said, “The good news is that the G8 announcement focuses attention on the economic problems of the highly indebted poor countries, but you have to understand the tradeoffs. Debt forgiveness isn’t free.” He and Serkan Arsianalp are of the opinion that debt relief may not necessarily be the most efficient way to help poor nations. They believe that foreign aid will benefit these countries much more than debt relief. Concerned people will probably find themselves wondering why both these scenarios cannot proceed concurrently and, indeed, this is the intention behind the Millennium Goals. The G8 has pledged, time and time again, to provide 0.7 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) for aid to underdeveloped nations. “If the USA alone were to honor this pledge it would provide $70 billion dollars per year—up to 35 times the quantity of resources on the table in Gleneagles [Scotland],” where the G8 summit was held, said Henry. The current US aid contribution is closer to 0.2 percent of GDP per year. And indeed substantial increases in aid did come out of the 2005 Scotland G8 summit although the US was not included in the group of countries agreeing to move faster towards the 0.7% GDP target. Henry cautioned that debt relief impacts little upon the lives of ordinary people when the countries that are being relieved lack the basic infrastructures necessary to bolster economic growth—roads, schools, hospitals, and clean water, well-defined property rights and a well-functioning judicial system. Debt relief then becomes nothing more than a temporary band-aid measure when what is called for is radical surgery. This is why the type of aid required for the fulfillment of the Millennium goals is the best path to follow—aid that will be used to help build the institutions that will eventually make them attractive places for both domestic and foreign investment. We also have to understand that aid itself is no panacea; measures have to be taken to insure that aid relief is not mismanaged as happened so often in the past, by designing aid packages that work. (for questions about news and research: gsb_info@gsb.standofrd.edu) And the most effective means of establishing effective aid packages is to combine debt relief and aid with the additional proviso of working effectively to root out government corruption.
|
