Are UN anti-poverty goals really delivering the future we want?
Latest global development targets fail to address African priorities
SCIENTISTS from across the world met recently in Hermanus to discuss approaches for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – UN targets agreed in 2012 for creating “The Future We Want”. It is a familiar scene: scientists, administrators and politicians closeted in a luxury hotel sharing views on how to resolve the still intractable problem of global poverty. (Slated attendees included the Minister of Science and Technology Naledi Pandor and the UN’s chief science adviser, Professor Jacqueline McGlade.)
Such efforts, however, have been criticised by Congolese academic Mbaya Kankwenda as part of a “development market” controlled by rich countries and their institutions, which produce and trade development products that are primarily consumed by the developing world.
The SDGs represent the latest in a series of development initiatives that have been championed by the UN since the 1960s. However, four decades later, African realities and interests appear still to be overlooked in the thinking behind the new goals and their financing.
The 17 SDGs follow the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of 2000, which set results-based, often numerical targets for improving health, education, gender equality and the environment. These goals came with the slogan “We Can End Poverty” – a grand claim, and one which the authors of an August 2014 report on funding the new goals claimed had been successfully addressed.
What the authors did not mention was that Africa was still home to more than a third of destitute people worldwide that year and had no prospect of meeting the MDGs’ poverty reduction goal by 2015 – the deadline for achieving them.
Poverty eradication remains a core aim of the new framework, but developing countries will need to find an additional $2.5 trillion annually to implement it. The UN working group addressing this huge funding gap stresses the crucial role of national financing strategies.
At the same time, the working group acknowledges that the money required is large relative to the size of the economies of many developing countries, and stresses the crucial role that international aid will continue to play.
Two major international financial bodies – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – play crucial roles as funding sources for the programme. The World Bank directs official flows of capital to the developing world, while the IMF offers loans to countries facing financial crises on condition that they adhere to marketoriented growth prescriptions.
However, these bodies have been widely criticised, including by American Nobel laureate and ex-World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, for their role in “a new form of economic colonialism”.
They have been accused of co-opting national elites in the service of a global development agenda that enables the perpetuation of a fundamentally unfair world economic order – one in which the developing world is cornered into offering a cheap supply of natural resources bought at a fraction of the cost of the finished products and services that the global North trades in return.
The framework for the SDGs (and the MDGs before them) touts a mantra of “country ownership” of development plans.
But the terms of IMF national recovery measures are often hidden in a confidential letter of intent between the government concerned and the fund. Despite the rhetorical support offered by the IMF and World Bank to the UN’s development agenda, these letters are neither made available for public scrutiny, nor tied to achievement of the world body’s development goals.
Indeed, the IMF stands accused of restricting the roles played by African parliaments and civil society in forging effective development plans. The benefits that African populations, particularly the poorest and most marginalised, may derive from the current system have been questioned.
In response, African policy analysts have sought to promote better coordinated and untied official development assistance. Transparent beneficiation policies, particularly in relation to the exploitation of minerals, could also be implemented to seek to staunch illicit financial flows which deprived the continent of $1.2 trillion to $1.4 trillion between 1980 and 2009.
Sixty to sixty-five percent of this huge sum – which was equivalent to Africa’s gross domestic product in 2014 – was lost through commercial transactions by multinational companies.
Meanwhile, although they acknowledge the importance of the global political and economic forces and ideas that have shaped the goals, many African analysts prefer to focus on the actual impact of their implementation on the continent when judging them.
In this regard, positive aspects of the millennium goals emerge – particularly those on health, which adopted a results-based-management approach linked to scientific studies into the causes of infant and maternal mortality, and the prevalence of HIV/Aids, malaria and TB. Important successes have been achieved by African socio-economic and biomedical interventions.
Innovative policies and programmes to promote the health of African populations have included, for example, a life-saving SMS service launched in Rwanda to enable health providers to track expectant mothers and provide antenatal care and birthing advice by cellphone.
In order to make greater progress, the international donors, which largely shaped the goals in the first place, should be held accountable for their crucial role in achieving them.
Millennium Development Goal Eight ostensibly sought to promote a fairer global economic and political environment through debt cancellation; trade justice; equitable governance in world institutions; and rights for the poor. This goal, which underpinned any hopes for the success of the other MDGs in the world’s poorest countries, obliged the countries of the rich North to alleviate the developing world’s debt burden and allocate at least 0.7 percent of their national incomes to global development.
However, these commitments by the donor community have generally not been met. For example, only five of the 28 members of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development had achieved the 0.7 percent aid target by 2014.
The sincerity of the international donor community in supporting the new development framework is clearly open to question.
In order to turn the SDGs’ slogan, “The Future We Want”, from a vague promise into reality, it is time the richest countries properly acknowledged and sought to redeem their financial and moral debt to the poor countries upon which much of their wealth has been built.
● Mark Patersonisco-editor of Africa and the Millennium Development Goals and has worked as a journalist and media and branding executive in South Africa,Britain and China.
IT IS TIME THE RICHEST COUNTRIES SOUGHT TO REDEEM THEIR FINANCIAL AND MORAL DEBT TO THE POOR COUNTRIES UPON WHICH MUCH OF THEIR WEALTH HAS BEEN BUILT