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DEVELOPMENT: Meeting MDGs "Not Rocket Science"
By Andrea Bordé
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 13 (IPS) - Achieving an ambitious set of anti-poverty benchmarks will take much more financing from rich countries, Jeffrey Sachs, the special advisor to the U.N. secretary-general on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), warned Monday.
There is currently no budgetary plan of action to implement the MDGs as world leaders prepare for a summit next year to assess progress ahead of the final deadline in 2015, Sachs said at a U.N. panel discussion.
"This is not rocket science. This is basic decency," said Sachs, as he waved blank spreadsheets in the air.
The eight MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger; universal primary education; promotion of gender equality; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; combating the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a North-South global partnership for development.
A summit meeting of 189 world leaders in September 2000 pledged to meet all of these goals by the year 2015. But their implementation has been undermined by the shortage of funds, cuts in development aid, and most recently, by the global economic crisis.
Sachs noted that while some MDGs, such as universal primary education, are making strides, this success could ultimately falter because many rich country governments are not investing in hiring teachers and providing meals for students, for example.
"The U.S. is more than 50 billion dollars a year short - every year," said Sachs. "If you don't fund the Global Fund, the children will die," he stressed, referring to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, established in 2002.
Sachs displayed a stack of MDG-related reports and recommendations that the Global Fund lacks money to implement.
"We do lose two million children a year, but we have not run out of time to save them," he said.
Esther Duflo, an expert in poverty alleviation and development economics at the U.S.-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that vaccination for all children in Africa was critical to several of the goals.
"Children miss a quarter of school days because of sickness," she said.
Duflo suggested that distributing food to every person who gets vaccinated, which was tested in a successful pilot project in rural India where bags of lentils were given in exchange for vaccination, was a less costly and effective incentive for poor people to make the long trek to a clinic with their young ones.
She also stressed the gap in political representation of women in middle-income and developing countries, which is undermining MDG3 on gender empowerment. The more women are represented, Duflo explained, the less of a gender bias there will be for women to be elected and hold high offices in the future.
Olav Kjorven, founder and director of the Jameel Poverty and Action lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called for coordination of global and regional commitments leading to the 2010 summit. He also said that there needs to be updated studies of the MDG goals, as well as analytical summaries.
"Their needs to be an overall MDG acceleration breakthrough framework promoted," said Kjorven.
Malawi, Togo, Ghana, Kenya, Niger, Tanzania, Malaysia and Thailand were among the countries that have shown significant progress towards the MDGs thus far. However, experts at the panel stressed that overall, much more needs to be done monetarily to help developing countries.
Sachs reiterated that timing is crucial. "It's a matter of implementation and scale-up of what we plan to do," he said. "This is our last chance to get this right."
"I believe the world is not a game, and I believe it is not that complicated," Sachs concluded.
(END/2009)
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