World Bulletin
Nations Struggling to Meet Antipoverty Goals
By Barbara Crossette
July 7 -- Some sober days of reckoning are in store for the Millennium Development Goals. World leaders have been asked to meet at the United Nations Sept. 20 to 22 to “accelerate progress” toward the goals, a sign that there is a lot more work to be done or the 2015 deadline will come and go in failure. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the summit a “crucial opportunity to redouble our efforts.”
The goals, adopted at a millennium-year summit in 2000, were designed to meet persistent underdevelopment in poor countries by setting targets for ending poverty and hunger, providing universal education, ensuring equality for women and girls, improving child health, reducing deaths in pregnancy and childbirth, combating HIV-AIDS and other diseases, saving the environment and creating global partnerships for growth.
In preparation for the September summit, UN agencies and programs, along with outside statisticians and data, have contributed to a sweeping report that finds good news and bad news. Though progress has been made, it is uneven, the report says. “And without a major push forward, many of the MDG targets are likely to be missed in most regions.” The report, accessible at www.un.org/millenniumgoals/, is an excellent guide, full of user-friendly graphics that show clearly the many measurements by which progress, or lack of it, is calculated.
The easy villains to blame are the recession of 2008-2009 and climate change, and these developments must be factored into explanations as to why some countries are lagging. In a small country like Cambodia, for example, scores of families dependent on exports can lose their income abruptly when Western consumers stop buying or companies close overseas operations to save money.
But there are also self-inflicted wounds. Among these singled out in the Millennium Development Goals Report 2010 are conflict and persecution, a lack of basic services, low education levels and malnutrition. Rapid population growth in the poorest countries remains a hurdle; millions of families have no access to family planning.
Globally, the report says, “About one in four children under the age of five are underweight, mainly due to lack of food and quality food, inadequate water, sanitation and health services, and poor care and feeding practices.” Efforts to reduce hunger have stalled or are sliding backward, the report adds. Giving women more power over their lives – and the inherent right to make decisions that benefit them and their families – is judged at best as “sluggish.” Women continue to die in pregnancy and childbirth at rates that doom the hope of meeting the maternal mortality goal. Domestic violence is on the rise in diverse countries, from Liberia, where a brutish civil war exacerbated the abuse of both women and men, to India, where a recent BBC report revealed that reports of honor killings for Hindu caste violations were on the rise.
What’s Working
On the positive side, the global poverty rate is falling over all, and though nearly a billion people will be living under an international poverty line of $1.25 a day in 2015 by UN estimates, that is half the number in 1990, the benchmark year for the Millennium Goals. Child deaths from leading diseases in poor countries were cut to 8.8 million in 2008 from 12.5 million in 1990. Much more antiretroviral therapy is available for HIV-infected people, and simple bed nets are reducing malaria.
The rate of deforestation seems to be slowing, the report says. It is evident, however, in places as vastly different as the Himalayan foothills, the jungles of Indonesian Sumatra or the mountains of Haiti that the next step, actually reversing the loss of forest cover and other vegetation that stabilizes the earth, is not happening in many places. This situation has made natural disasters, especially floods, far more dangerous and deadly. Corruption has meant building codes are routinely circumvented, as Haiti’s disastrous earthquake showed in January, and several earthquakes in China in recent years have also demonstrated.
To mobilize global action in the five years remaining before the 2015 deadline, Secretary-General Ban recently assembled a multinational advisory group. His choice of co-chairmen is interesting – and controversial. They are Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, who has achieved remarkable development in a country wracked by genocide in 1994 but who has also been attracting international criticism more recently for his increasingly autocratic style; Ted Turner, chairman of the United Nations Foundation; and Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain, who is struggling to keep the Spanish economy afloat.
Other members of the advisory group, representing all regions, include Jeffrey Sachs from the United States, who is the secretary-general’s special adviser on the MDGs; and Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Elusive Goals
There is much to be gleaned from the 2010 report. Assessments of where the world is headed on several goals critical to youth give particular cause for concern about the future. On Goal 3, achieve universal primary education, the report says gloomily: “Hope dims.” One fact: “Between now and 2015, the number of new teachers needed in sub-Saharan Africa alone equals the current teaching force in the region,” the report says.
The developing countries with high child mortality are off course on Goal 4, reducing child deaths. But an interesting analysis applies to this: Poverty is not always the cause of child mortality. The report notes: “Against steep odds, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Eritrea, the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic, Malawi, Mongolia and Nepal have all reduced their under-five mortality rates by 4.5 per cent annually or more.” Political will may be the cure.
Other countries with high child mortality rates have made little or no progress. Of the 67 countries with high death rates for children, only 10 have a hope of meeting Goal 4. And of those children who survive in poverty, the toll on their health and abilities to develop — especially when schooling is also denied -- may be set back irretrievably. Yet the children in these ranks and other children not born to affluence are central, numerically, to the future of political development, peace and economic growth in industry, agriculture and all additional sectors in the developing world. Their small faces hover over each of the Millennium Goals.
Barbara Crossette is the United Nations correspondent for The Nation and a former New York Times UN bureau chief.
Keywords: MDGs, Ban Ki-moon, Paul Kagame, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Ted Turner, Jeffrey Sachs, Bill Gates
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