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MDGs: A review and strategy
08 September 2008
The Daily Times
Lilongwe: The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of eight specific (in many instances, quantitative) objectives for the betterment of the human condition, including goals of poverty reduction and improvement in education, gender equality, health, and environmental quality. These goals, targeted for fulfillment by 2015, have since become the fulcrum for public policy discussions and actions concerning socio-economic development. Meetings and conferences on the goals under the auspices of the United Nations and the governing bodies of member countries have been held regularly since 2001.
The MDGs replace various previous UN initiatives to provide time-bound and quantitative global goals to guide and influence national and international strategies for development. Since its creation the United Nations system has defined a wide variety of global goals with specific outcome targets, including among others, accelerating economic growth through increased international assistance (a focus during the UN Development).
While progress towards the MDGs has been substantial in several parts of the world, many countries and entire regions remain off-track on some or all of the goals. In the poorest countries, precious little progress has been achieved. The epicentre of the crisis is Sub-Saharan Africa, where rapidly growing populations are exposed to endemic disease, chronic hunger, rampant illiteracy, environmental degradation, gender inequality, and poor access to basic education and infrastructure. Much of the continent is stagnating, with some countries experiencing regress in key human development indicators, including life expectancy.
While there is no single explanation for any individual country’s lack of progress, distinguished development thinkers have stressed three separate fundamental causes, some of which can occur simultaneously.
To begin with, the importance of good governance for economic growth and poverty reduction is now generally accepted. Participatory democratic systems and the rule of law are essential to ensure that leaders are held accountable to the people and that open and transparent systems exist for the management of public resources.
In Africa, Malawi inclusive, corrupt practices continue to exact heavy economic costs by distorting the operation of free markets, hampering economic development, and impairing the ability of institutions to deliver efficient services to the public. The capacity of the state—in administrative, regulatory, and technical capacities—is still inadequate in many countries.
Good governance has a direct bearing on poverty, for poor people are often direct victims of bad governance. Due to their lack of representation, they tend to be left out of public expenditure programmes, especially those related to access to productive assets and the delivery of social services. But they are first in line to benefit from good governance. Effective public budget and financial management together with mechanisms for ensuring accountability in the use of resources are critical aspects of public actions to reduce poverty.
In light of the critical importance of good governance for continuing economic and social progress, African countries must forge effective participatory forms of governance and empower their citizens through popular participation and decentralisation. In economic management, efforts must continue to establish effective and transparent systems of financial supervision and legal accountability, efficient administration systems, a functioning legal framework, and predictable regulatory structures. All these call for an effective civil service capable of meeting the challenges of development.
Efforts to overcome some of the challenges of improving governance in Africa will require the support of the international community, particularly in eliminating corruption and excessive military spending and preventing and resolving conflict and war.
A second case is when countries are caught in poverty traps. They are governed reasonably well in relation to their income level, but they cannot make the investments in human capital and infrastructure that are required to achieve self-sustaining economic growth. Under the stress of extreme poverty, countries face a higher risk of conflict, for example when failed rains contribute to food scarcity and tensions are heightened. Such countries may face systemic challenges, such as low-productivity agriculture due to adverse agro-ecological conditions, a very high disease burden, adverse transport conditions and large shares of the population living far from the coast, and so forth. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa are most vulnerable to such challenges.
Finally, a number of Millennium Development Goals are not being met because policymakers lack awareness on how to proceed or simply neglect core development priorities. A particularly glaring example is maternal health. Many relatively developed countries continue to experience high rates of maternal mortality, even though access to emergency obstetric care could straightforwardly reduce these rates. Likewise, environmental management can be improved and gender biases in public investment and social policies ended if policymakers decide to make these issues priorities.
All the foregoing policies are essential for attaining the MDGs, but African countries will have to do even more, for long-term sustained economic growth requires the structural transformation of their economies. Today, 80 percent of African countries depend on just two primary commodities for more than half their export earnings. They need to diversify their production base and increase their exports of manufactures, while continuing to exploit the comparative advantage they enjoy in primary commodities.
* Perspective by Chimwemwe Kanyenda
Keywords: MDGs, donor aid, governance, corruption
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