Bold
and urgent action is needed to reduce extreme poverty and improve
people's economic and social prospects in developing countries in
keeping with a set of key development targets, called the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), says a report released today
by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
“The credibility of the entire
development community is at stake as never before,” said World Bank
President James Wolfensohn in introducing the second annual Global
Monitoring Report: MDGs: From Consensus to Momentum. “Rich
countries must now deliver on the promises they have made in terms
of aid, trade and debt relief, and the developing countries,
especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, need to aim higher and do better
in terms of their own policies and governance and to make more
effective use of aid.”
The 2005 Global Monitoring Report is
part of a five-year stocktaking effort to monitor progress towards
achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. More than 180
world leaders agreed unanimously to the development goals at the UN
Millennial Summit in New York in September 2000. The report will be
discussed by finance ministers, central bankers, and development
ministers in Washington at the spring meetings of the World Bank
and IMF. It will also serve as an important input into the upcoming
G8 heads of state meeting to be held in the UK in July and the UN
Summit on the MDGs in September.
With just a decade left to go,
progress toward the MDGs has been slower and more uneven across
regions than originally envisaged, with Sub-Saharan Africa falling
far short. In calling for stepped-up action, the new report points
to opportunities created by recently improved economic performance
in many developing countries. It outlines a five-point agenda
designed to accelerate progress:
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Ensure that development efforts are country-owned. Scale up
development impact through country-owned and led poverty reduction
strategies;
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Improve the environment for private sector-led economic growth.
Strengthen fiscal management and governance, ease the business
environment, and invest in infrastructure;
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Scale up delivery of basic human services. Rapidly increase the
supply of health care workers and teachers, provide larger and more
flexible and predictable financing for these recurrent
cost-intensive services, and strengthen institutional capacity;
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Dismantle barriers to trade. Through an ambitious Doha Round,
including major reform of agricultural trade policies, and also
increasing “aid for trade”;
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Double development aid in the next five years. In addition, improve
the quality of aid, with faster progress on aid coordination and
harmonization.
“To achieve the goal of cutting
poverty in half by 2015, Sub-Saharan Africa needs to substantially
raise annual GDP growth rates, to approximately 7 percent over the
next decade, roughly double the region’s current growth rate,” said
Anne O. Krueger, the IMF’s First Deputy Managing Director. “While
the domestic agenda necessary for such a take-off is clearly
country-specific, the broad priorities are sound macroeconomic
management, an enabling climate for private sector led growth, and
strong public sector governance.”
Over the last five years, many
countries have shown improvement in economic policies and
governance. Surging world trade and dramatic reductions of poverty
in some countries provide grounds for hope in others. China’s
growth between 1981 and 2001 has reduced the proportion of
extremely poor from 40 percent to 21 percent of the population --
400 million people. Vietnam reduced extreme poverty from 51 percent
in 1990 to 14 percent in 2002. The goal to halve poverty by 2015
will likely be met at the global level, but not in Sub-Saharan
Africa unless progress there can be accelerated quickly.
But conditions for achieving better
economic performance in Sub-Saharan Africa are improving: 12
African countries are currently experiencing growth spurts above
the trends for the region, with average GDP growth over the last
decade of 5.5 percent or more. ?
Prospects for achieving the MDGs are
gravest in health. As it looks now, most countries cannot meet the
goals to reduce child and maternal mortality and achieve universal
education. Substantial increases in the supply of teachers,
doctors, nurses and community health workers are needed. Africa,
for example, needs to triple its health workforce—adding one
million—by 2015.
“Behind cold data on the MDGs are
real people and lack of progress has real and tragic consequences,”
said the World Bank’s Zia Qureshi, the report’s lead author. “Every
week, 200,000 children under five die of disease. Every week 10,000
women die giving birth. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone this year, 2
million people will die of AIDS. Worldwide, more than 100 million
children in developing countries are not in school.”
The report says that meeting the MDGs
will require a doubling of the amount of official development
assistance (ODA) reaching the poorest countries. Wolfensohn urged
donors to use this year of stocktaking to raise their commitments
and signal that support for the MDGs is forthcoming. “At stake are
not just the prospects for hundreds of millions of people to escape
poverty, hunger, and disease, but also prospects for long-term
security and peace which are intrinsically tied to development,” he
said.?
While aid volumes have risen since
the UN Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey in 2002,
when donors pledged to significantly increase assistance to the
poorest countries, debt relief and technical cooperation account
for a full two-thirds of the increase. The need for aid is
especially acute in Sub-Saharan Africa. Given reforms underway, the
region could effectively use a doubling of aid over the next five
years.
(China.org.cn April 13, 2005)