When United Nations Secretary GeneÂÂral Ban Ki-moon announced this week that subÂÂSaharan Africa will fail to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it came as no great surprise.
The mid-term evaluation of progress made in reaching the objectives has been presaged by years of missed benchmarks, donors reneging on aid promises and the maintenance of crippling trade terms, which keep the developing world mired in poverty.
As international bureaucrats go, Eveline Herfkens, head of the UN’s Millennium Campaign, is refreshingly direct. Clearly she is frustrated by the fact that the blame for poor progress on achieving the goals is heaped constantly at the UN’s door.
”The degree to which commitments are kept depends largely on people outside of the UN system. We don’t have a police force which we can send over to make sure member states keep their promises,” she says bluntly. ”The UN can create the platform, but only the citizens of those states can hold their governments accountable.”
She doesn’t pull her punches on the track record of the rich countries, rattling off statistics and anecdotes at a bewildering pace: ”Look, there’s a lot that stinks in aid budgets. Debt relief as aid definitely stinks! Aid needs to be effective — but only Britain and the Nordic countries give untied aid. Portugal’s aid creates jobs for Portuguese nationals … 78% of Germany’s [aid] budget for primary education is spent on consultants with no thought about recurrent costs or sustainability… European agriculture is destroying livelihoods and making development impossible in Africa …”
But she emphasises that, although rich countries must be answerable for failing to put their money where their mouths are, not much is heard about the flipside of the coin: the need for citizens of the developing world to mobilise and hold their governments responsible for meeting the goals.
It is at local government level, she believes, that citizens can have the most direct impact. She explains that while poverty and exclusion are experienced locally it is — conversely — at the local level that services such as water, schools and clinics are provided. She believes that citizens should use the MDGs to put pressure on local authorities, which have the political weight to lobby national government on behalf of their constituents.
The global trend towards decentralisation of power from national to local government, combined with rapid urbanisation — about half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas — has thrust local government firmly into the spotlight. Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan believes that up to 70% of the goals should be achieved through local government.
Jeffrey Sachs — the intellectual pin-up of the development aid world — not only agrees, but goes so far as to argue that aid should be channelled directly to cities and towns, as is the case with his Millennium Villages project. (Millennium Villages are those that have successfully used technologies, investment and community-led interventions to escape extreme poverty and meet the MGDs. They have used modest financial support to move from subsistence farming to self-sustaining commercial activity.)
He expresses frustration with much development aid which, he says, is ”too little, poorly targeted and directed at the wrong level of government. If everything remains at the general level we don’t get results.” He is not advocating opposition to national governments, but points out that putting money straight into the local level allows donors to skip two or three steps and save on attendant transaction costs.
He also is a fan of the twinning arrangements between developed and developing cities, which allow for sharing of skills and resources, as facilitated by the United Cities and Local Governments organisation (the voice of local government at the UN).
None of this suggests that Sachs has a high opinion of the donor community. ”They are not paying attention to the MDGs. If their jobs actually depended on meeting these goals — such as reducing child mortality rates — they would be sending money straight to local governments.” This lack of measurement by results is a major contributor to the world’s failure to meet the goals, says Sachs, who emphasises the need to move from words to action.
He clearly feels frustrated by all the talk-shopping that the MDGs have generated: ”Most donors don’t really know what they are doing and aren’t accountable for results. Sometimes I feel they are up in the clouds and not grounded in specific problems.”
This lack of focus and direction often leads to a call for ”capacity building” — a topic guaranteed to get Sachs steaming. ”Too much money is spent on conferences and workshops, which are then called ‘capacity building’, but don’t really lead anywhere and aren’t part of a detailed and thoughtful development strategy. There is too much ‘capacity building’ as a stand-alone activity — it’s a lazy way of thinking. It’s all theoretical, but the goals are actually quite specific. There is no sense of urgency and their jobs don’t depend on it. But when anything goes wrong they say, ‘Africa did it wrong — we need to build capacity’.”
Sachs points to Jo’burg as an example of an African city where money ”shows up in real results”. But he says that while it has the infrastructure to attract foreign investors — which cities such as Nairobi and Dar es Salaam don’t — it needs to become development oriented, create jobs though labour-intensive industry, diversify its economy, maintain law and order and become an internationally competitive export city.
He points out that, without the necessary financing for projects, all the capacity in the world becomes hypothetical. ”Start with the money — it’s the energy you need to make everything else work. If African cities could make basic investments in infrastructure such as roads and sanitation, the capacity would come in the context of actually carrying out such programmes.”
A watered-down education
Sub-Saharan Africa will fail to meet the goals set seven years ago for eradicating global poverty by 2015, the United Nations warned this week.
In a progress report at the halfway point to the target date for hitting the millennium development goals (MDGs), the UN said the world was failing in the battle to combat hunger, cut infant mortality and put every child in school.
”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,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said. ”But they also point to how much remains to be done.”
Boosted by the economic progress in China and India, the UN said the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day had fallen from 23,4% in 1999 to 19,2% and the world was on track to hit the 15,8% target for 2105. But the 23,4% benchmark for Africa would not be met.
The UN study coincided with a report from the British charity WaterAid, which said attempts to hit the MDGs were being hampered by under-investment in clean water and proper sanitation.
Henry Northover, WaterAid’s head of policy, said: ”Global aid spending on health and education has nearly doubled since 1990 while the share allocated to water and sanitation has contracted.”
In recent years, donor countries have committed themselves to building schools and providing backing for health systems in poor countries in the hope that they can hit the millennium goals of putting every child into primary education and of cutting infant mortality rates by two-thirds.
In a report published this week, WaterAid said that education — particularly that of girls — suffered in those countries that lacked clean water and sanitation.
”Although rarely recognised by education policy-makers, a large part of the explanation for this high dropout rate is inadequate water and sanitation. Girls miss school because they spend hours fetching water for their families. With the onset of puberty, they face the embarrassment of menstruation in schools where toilets are unclean, have no doors and are shared with the boys in their class.”
The report added that in countries with high child mortality rates, diarhoea accounted for more deaths than any other cause — more than malaria and HIV/Aids combined.
”Over 90% of diarrhoeal deaths are attributed to poor hygiene, sanitation and unsafe drinking water.
”So, while more than 550-million children have been vaccinated against measles since 2000, driving down measles deaths in Africa by 75%, little action has been taken to prevent the daily death toll of 4 900 children afflicted with diarrhoea.”
The UN has a target of halving the number of people without access to clean water and sanitation by 2015, with the need for progress greatest in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
WaterAid said, that instead of being overlooked by donors, investment in water and sanitation was vital as part of an integrated approach to tackling poverty. In Bangladesh, a country that has made water and sanitation a priority, there had been a dramatic reduction in water-borne diseases, the charity said. — Larry Elliott Â