Archive for September 25th, 2007
The UN Convenes ‘unprecedented’ Meeting to Boost African Development
With the whole of sub-Saharan Africa currently off track for meeting a single one of the ambitious goals the world has set itself for slashing poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy by 2015, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is convening an unprecedented meeting of development leaders on Friday to put the continent back on the rails to progress. The MDG Africa Steering Group was set up by Mr. Ban after a report in June showed that despite faster growth and strengthened institutions, Africa at its present rate would fail to achieve any of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the UN Millennium Summit in 2000.
“It is an unprecedented gathering bringing together the heads, the apex I would say, of the entire international development system,” UN Development Programme (UNDP) official Guido Schmidt-Traub told a news briefing today.
The inaugural meeting will bring together leaders from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission, the African Union, the African Development Bank, the UN Development Group, which is chaired by UNDP, and the Islamic Development Bank.
The meeting will focus on three objectives: the international system’s support for African governments in implementing practical programmes to achieve the MDGs in five areas – health, education, infrastructure, agriculture and food security; the need to ensure aid predictability so that African governments can plan years ahead for additional hospitals, schools and training doctors, teachers and nurses; and enhancing collaboration among the Group’s members at the country level.
Mr. Schmidt-Traub noted that the June report highlighted some of the success stories coming out Africa. “There are actually quite a few,” he said. “That is the good news and the challenge now is to scale up these success stories, and that can be done simply by implementing existing commitments.
“The key message today is that existing commitments if fully implemented are enough and sufficient to achieve the MDGs in the whole of Africa and so the focus now has to be squarely on implementation,” he added.
In all cases, the concerted follow-through needs to be broader, more effective and scaled up, he stressed. “The meeting itself will focus on getting a fuller understanding of the objectives and then really deciding on how to follow through,” he said.
The follow-through will be led by a second group called the MDG Africa Working Group, led by the Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro, which will meet for the first time on 20 September, involving senior operational leaders of the Group’s organizations plus other bodies such as the 30-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of industrialized, market-economy countries.
Successes cited by the June report included the expanded AIDS treatment, increased agricultural productivity, rising school enrolment and access to water and sanitation.
These “demonstrate that rapid progress is possible when sound national policies are met with full support, including increased development assistance, from the international system,” the Group said in a media advisory.
Stressing the need for predictability in aid, it noted that although the G8 summit of industrial nations in 2005 promised to increase Official Development Assistance to Africa to $50 billion annually by 2010, African countries still do not know how this promise will translate into their country-level budgeting flows.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )MDGs: Grassroots Awareness Required Before Demand
Have you ever wondered if there is anything you can do to contribute to solving global poverty? Did you ever get that sinking feeling that you are just one person who is too insignificant in the face of the forces of global domination and systematic oppression to make any difference? How many times has helplessness at things happening around you or in the wider world forced you to conclude that you cannot beat the system and that at best your only choice is to either join them or drop out?
If you answer yes to one or more or all of these questions, do not be embarrassed at all. You are one among many billions of us (actually 6.5 billions).
Most of us disapprove many things happening around us and in the world but feel we lack or actually lack any power to change them. There is frustration that no matter what we may think or do the world would always remain skewed against the poor and powerless, the little men and women, who constitute the majority. Whether it is the environment, the economy, education or health many accept that the rich always squeeze the poor and get their way all the time.
We all know that Mahatma Gandhi’s famous words: ‘there is enough in the world to satisfy our needs but not enough to satisfy our greed’ uttered so many decades ago are as true (if not truer) today than when they were first uttered. The vast wealth due to improvement in technology, science and genetic engineering in the last 5 decades is more than enough for all of us but the structures of power within nations and between nations continue to reward those at the very top while penalizing the majority poor at the bottom of the pile.
Poor people in poorer countries of the world cry out against their rich who also groan at the richer countries. Within richer countries, their own poor feel no better, yet the system that is producing this fabulous wealth in one pole and desperate poverty in another in the same universe is created by human beings. It can either be changed through their individual and collective efforts, cooperatively, confrontations or through contradictions.
The United Nations ushered in the 3rd Millennium (and its 55th anniversary) at the Millennium Summit in 2000 with a Declaration that recognized the world could be made better and we all deserve to treat each other and our shared environment better. This was encapsulated in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It was an attempt to create a new social contract between the peoples and governments of the world committing all to 8 Goals that range from ending hunger through universal access to basic education, women empowerment, health, environment to reforming the unequal global trade, increasing quality Aid and canceling debt of poor countries. Since the MDGs became the ‘new’ language of development discourse, all kinds of debate as to whether they are achievable or not or even if they are adequate for guaranteeing peace and equal opportunity for development for all peoples continue. Wherever one stands in the argument, nobody will be hurt if they are achieved by 2015.
The UN itself realized that neither the declaration alone nor the official adoption of the MDGs will guarantee their fulfillment. That is why the UN Millennium Campaign was established to work with Citizens to hold their governments accountable for their fulfillment. The Campaign works with and through National Coalitions in various countries allied to the Global Call Against Poverty (GCAP), faith based groups, local councils, National, sub regional and regional legislatures, Youth, Students, Women and Trade Unions, to ensure political accountability of all leaders to their peoples at various levels. The MDGs can only be achieved at the local and community level. That is where their impact will be directly felt.
Over the recent years of Neo-liberal economic hegemony, economic policies within countries and globally are undemocratic and dominated by technicians and all kinds of latter day voodoo experts from the Bretton Woods institutions. Citizens who are the producers of their national and global wealth and a majority of whom are victims of these policies are totally excluded. The MDGs have tremendous potential for opening up democratic spaces for political accountability of leaders.
Through MDGs, it is possible to reverse this arrogant trend of making economic issues the sole preserve of economic egg heads and judge economic policies not just in terms of macroeconomic growth but development, how they impact on the general welfare of the majority of the peoples of the world who are poor.
As part of efforts to popularize the MDGs and focus global attention on poverty the UN Millennium Campaign in partnership with GCAP Allies and other International partners including OXFAM, Action Aid International, NOVIB, Micah Challenge, has been participating in a one month Campaign of activities from the 16th of September to culminate in the marking of the INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR POVERTY ERADICATION.
If you ever imagined a world in which the MDGs are a political priority for all our governments and other governments in the world. A world without poverty where every child is guaranteed education, where many women do not die in labor and people living with HIV/Aids have universal access to free treatment based on need not cash and Malaria, TB and other preventable diseases no longer kill us in the vast numbers they currently do. A world in which the environment is fully protected and the vast creativity of human mind and scientific discovery will be used for sustainable development that guarantees that this earth that we are loaning from the future generation is handed on safely.
There is a small chance to put your imagination into Action. The Goals sound like dreams but even the creation of this world must have begun with a dream. It needs not remain so. It is a world that we can bring about by first making people aware of the MDGs and working with them to demand their fulfillment from their leaders. Holding them to the promise is all that it takes.
If the richer countries deliver on Goal 8, the poorer countries can also deliver on goals 1-7. It is a complementary process that must run concurrently from goal 1 to 8. You can contribute to making it happen wherever you maybe. Together we can all make the difference between fulfillment and indifference.
By Tajudeen Abdul
Raheem of Justice Africa Nigeria
Are MDGs A Passing Cloud?
DEVELOPMENT experts and civil society organizations have concluded, and rightly so, that Global Partnership for Development — the last of the eight MDGs — is actually the most important of them all. The other seven set of goals – eradicating extreme poverty; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases and ensuring environmental sustainability – all hinge on Goal 8 which addresses how developed countries can assist the developing world achieve the rest of the goals.Lawrence Egulu, the director of economic and social policy at the ICFTU, African Regional Office in Nairobi told an AWEPON media training workshop in Kampala, that MDGs will just be ‘a passing cloud’ unless the developed world does more to uplift the developing countries.”We are now five years since the Millennium Declaration in 2000, but have we gone three-quarters in meeting the MDG targets? Where are we in UPE (Universal Primary Education), infant mortality, maternal mortality and environmental sustainability?” he asked.
Warren Nyamugasira of the Uganda NGO Forum says MDGs was a global pact of the 189 states that endorsed it five years ago and failure in one country meant failure by the whole world. He said the world had enough resources to achieve the MDGs except the focus should now shift on how to spread the resources across the globe through trade justice, debt cancellation and better quality and more aid. Economist Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad says all the MDGs and agendas were linked to the market economy and foreign aid. Unless more is done, he said, the increasing disparities in countries will continue.
”The 2003 Human Development Report of the UNDP finds that compared to 1990, 54 countries have become poorer and the number of poor people has increased in 21 countries,” IPS quoted Ahmad as telling a gathering in August.“The achievement of the goals will crucially depend on implementation of the last goal, i.e., a global partnership for development. All of its seven targets are to be basically fulfilled by the developed countries. But can that be ensured?” Ahmad cited statistics to show that barely half of this year’s global requirement of development assistance could be realised. ”The MDGs are nothing but another U.N.- sponsored agenda which will eventually be dumped under the table, without being implemented,” he
predicted.
Goal 8 is therefore key if MDGs is not going to be a passing cloud. The goal calls for an increase in the official development assistance (ODA); measures to ensure debt sustainability in the long term; equitable, rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory multilateral trading and financial system; and measures to address the special needs of least developed, landlocked and small island developing countries.
However, the obtaining situation is far from expected. While ODA averaged 0.25% of the donor countries’ Gross National Income in 2003 up from 0.23% in 2002, it was still below the required 0.33% reached in the 1990s and far too short of the ODA needed to achieve MDGs. Countries in Sub- Saharan Africa like the rest of the developing countries still have unfavourble terms of trade. Despite several debt cancellation under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) framework, most of them are still mired in debt servicing and unfavourble terms of trade which hinder their investments in the social services. For instance, according to Nyamugasira, despite a series of debt cancellations, Uganda’s external debt has risen from US$3.8bn to US $4bn. He said the money paid in interest on loans is estimated at US $200m annually. On unfair terms of trade, he said while Uganda earned US $400m from coffee between 1996-1998, it now earns US $100m yet it is exporting more coffee than ever before.
In Ethiopia, external debt stands at US $2.9 billion while Tanzania uses as much as 5% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for external debt servicing. In Kenya, the public debt stood at 74.3% of the GDP (2004) while the current account balance was in the negative at – US $459.2m. Uganda’s situation is no better with the public debt at 73.9% of GDP and current account balance in deficit of -US $590m. In it inconceivable how these countries will achieve MDGs without greatly increased aid.
While in June 2005, the major developed countries agreed to full debt cancellation of the US $40bn that 18 poor countries owed International Financial Institutions – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African development Bank – civil society organizations have pointed out that spreading the cancellation over 40 years meant failure to address the debt crisis. Stephen Rand of Jubilee Debt Campaign, UK had this to say: “This deal is an inadequate response to the global debt crisis, particularly in its failure to challenge the damaging and undemocratic conditions that are consistently attached to debt relief. This [deal] will provide less than US$1 billion per year – the equivalent of less than one dollar per head per year for the people who will benefit – when more than $10 billion a year of debt cancellation is needed to contribute to the ending of extreme poverty.”
In a joint African civil society statement on the G8 Summit’s conclusions, posted on Eurodad website, Hassen Lorgat of South Africa’s SANGOCO, a national NGO forum, stressed that “the debt package only provides only 10% of the relief required and affects only one third of the countries that need it. A large component of the US$50 billion pledged is drawn from existing obligations”. Lidy Nacpil, international coordinator of Jubilee South said, “the conditionalities attached to debt cancellation will exacerbate poverty rather than end it”.
AFRODAD commented:”We continue to question – how democratic is the selection criteria to pick on post completion point HIPCs and, after all, the agreement does not address the real global power imbalances in which debt is just but a conduit of expressing it. We reiterate our position that the debt crisis needs a lasting solution in which all stakeholders – debtors and creditors have a say.” The plan also falls far short of what the African Union has called for. The draft declaration of the 5th African Union Summit, held from 28 June to 5 July, indicates that African leaders are calling for “full debt cancellation for all African nations” to the tune of US$350 billion – a far cry from the US$40 billion promised by the G8, the website said.
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