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Confronting inequality and poverty. Eight Goals for 2015. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger Achieve universal primary education Promote gender equality and empower women Reduce child mortality Improve maternal health Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
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Eight Goals for 2015 • Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger • Achieve universal primary education • Promote gender equality and empower women • Reduce child mortality • Improve maternal health • Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases • Ensure environmental sustainability • Develop a global partnership for development
Millennium Declaration • In 2000, 189 nations made a promise to free people from extreme poverty and multiple deprivations. This pledge became the eight Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015. In September 2010, the world recommitted itself to accelerate progress towards these goals.
Are we on track to achieve the MDGs by 2015? End poverty and hunger • Trends in the prevalence of undernourishment remain unchanged with South-Eastern Asia, Eastern Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean likely to achieve the hunger-reduction target by 2015. Among the remaining regions which are unlikely to achieve the target if past trends persist, the percentage of population estimated to be suffering from chronic hunger in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia is worryingly high at 27% and 20% respectively.
Create an international partnership • Millennium Development Goal 8, covering the international partnership, aims to create an enabling environment for poverty eradication through a fair and open trading system, substantial increase in development assistance, poor-country debt relief and improved terms of access of the developing world to medicines and technology. (Goals 1 – 7 target hunger, extreme poverty, disease, environmental degradation and obstacles to the advancement of women and to achieving universal primary education.)
Official development assistance (ODA) from traditional donors has more than doubled since 2000, reaching a record $129 billion in 2010. But the 2010 total still falls $21 billion short of commitments made in 2005 at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, the report finds, and is less than half of the total needed to fulfill the longstanding target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income of traditional donors.
Removal of the burden of unsustainable debt from many poor countries is another area in which the international environment has improved since 2000. But recent financial turmoil has caused some backsliding. The report cites the International Monetary Fund’s identification of 19 developing countries that are in debt distress or at high risk, including eight that earlier benefited from debt relief.
Reducing childhood mortality • The number of children in developing countries who died before they reached the age of five dropped from 100 to 72 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1990 and 2008. • Almost nine million children still die each year before they reach their fifth birthday. • The highest rates of child mortality continue to be found in sub-Saharan Africa, where, in 2008, one in seven children died before their fifth birthday. • Of the 67 countries defined as having high child mortality rates, only 10 are currently on track to meet the MDG target.
Child deaths are falling, but not quickly enough. Between1990 and 2008, the death rate for children under five has decreased by 28 per cent, from 100 to 72 deaths per 1,000 live births. That means that, worldwide, 10,000 fewer under-fives die each day.
Many countries have shown considerable progress in tackling child mortality. Almost one third of the 49 least developed countries have managed to reduce their under five mortality rates by 40 per cent or more over the past twenty years. However, the current rate of progress is well short of the MDG target of a two-thirds reduction by 2015.
Since 1990, child mortality rates have been more than halved in Northern Africa, Eastern Asia, Western Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. By contrast, many countries with unacceptably high rates of child mortality, most notably in sub-Saharan Africa, have made little or no progress in recent years.
While under-five mortality rates have declined by 22 percent since 1990 in sub-Saharan Africa, high fertility rates and the slow pace of reducing deaths mean that the absolute number of children who have died has actually increased, from four million in 1990 to 4.4 million in 2008. Sub-Saharan Africa has one fifth of the world’s children under the age of five, and it accounted for half of their 8.8 million deaths in 2008. In Southern Asia too, child mortality rates remain high, with progress insufficient to meet the 2015 target.
The causes of child deaths are related to malnutrition and lack of access to adequate primary health care and infrastructure, such as water and sanitation, in many developing countries. Pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria and AIDS accounted for 43 per cent of all deaths in under-fives worldwide in 2008, and more than a third of all child deaths were attributable to undernutrition.
Considerable progress was made in routine immunization against measles worldwide, particularly in Africa, protecting millions of children against this often fatal disease. In 2008, coverage reached 81 per cent in the developing regions, up from 70 per cent in 2000. However, projections show that without sustained funding for immunization activities in priority countries, mortality from measles could rebound quickly, resulting in approximately 1.7 million measles related deaths between 2010 and 2013. United Nations Development Program
In your lifetime, will the failed state problem be solved? • Yes • No • I have not decided
In your lifetime, will problem of gender inequality be solved ? • Yes • No • I have not decided
In your lifetime, will the problem of childhood mortality be solved? • Yes • No • I have not decided
In your lifetime, will the problem of environmental unsustainability be solved? • Yes • No • I have not decided
In your lifetime, will the problems raised by the “Story of Stuff” be solved? • Yes • No • I have not decided
Gender and peace The challenge here is reducing the global problem (epidemic) of violence against women. “What we have discovered is that the very best predictor of how insecure and unstable a nation is not its level of democracy, it’s not its level of wealth, it’s not what ‘Huntington civilization’ it belongs to, but is in fact best predicted by the level of violence against women in the society,” said Valerie Hudson, co-author of Sex and World Peace, at an April 26 book launch at the Wilson Center.
Valerie Hudson made a simple comparison of deaths from conflict and the number of “missing women” in the world. Looking at “as many [conflicts] as I possibly could,” Hudson said she totaled 152 million deaths in 20th century fighting. By comparison, the United Nations Population Fund reported that at the turn of the century – just “one generation, if you will, of the century” – 163 million women went missing from Asia alone.
The missing women phenomenon is “a significant paradox” in global development, said Jeni Klugman, the World Bank’s director of gender and development, “On the one hand there have been enormous advances in terms of life expectancy, but at the same time, relative to boys and men, there’s still enormous excess mortality.”“We see females who are missing at birth – and that’s the fairly well-known problem of sex-selective abortions…in China and India,” she continued. “And then we have girls who die before they reach their fifth birthday…inadequate water and bad sanitation…and then of course we still have fairly high rates of maternal mortality, which are affecting women of child-bearing age.”
Where a woman lives also affects her security, or lack thereof, at different stages of her life, said Emmett. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, relatively balanced sex ratios suggest that females are safer as babies than in South Asia, where ratios skew in males’ favor. As mothers, however, women may have a “more favorable status” in the Middle East and North Africa than sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, given the region’s relatively low maternal mortality rates, he said. Chad Emmet, Co-author, Sex and World Peace
Will there be enough change in the 21st century to reduce violence against women? • Yes • No • I do not know
Poor land tenure and failed states According to Mike Davis in Planet of Slums, lack of land tenure is a key unsolved problem for poor people in slums. There is a broader literature on land tenure and failed states.
The murder of five land rights campaigners during the last two months – one in Colombia, three in Brazil, and one in Cambodia – have not captured many headlines, but they are a reminder of the central role land tenure plays not just in rural economic development but also in sparking broadly distributed economic gains throughout a society. Violence has often been threatened against those around the world who advocate for the land rights of the world’s poor. Tim Hanstad, Environmental lawyer
Many are sharecroppers, indentured servants, or informal possessors who struggle to climb out of poverty because they don’t have incentives to invest in their land to improve their harvest and their lives. Their lack of legal control over the land is a huge stumbling block not just for their immediate families, but also for the development of their communities and nations…, Why nations fail: the origins of power, prosperity and poverty
The authors, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, of MIT and Harvard, respectively, make clear that even in the most dysfunctional nations, money is being made – often lots of it – but it is not being distributed widely. These “extractive systems,” they argue, are designed specifically to take wealth from a broad class of people (slaves, farmers, mine workers, etc.) to benefit a much smaller subset (the ruling elite, the landed gentry, etc). Sierra Leone’s diamond mines, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s cobalt mines, and Burma’s vast timber and mineral resources are all examples of systems that exploit not just labor but sovereign natural resources and funnels those proceeds to a small group with the goal of continually extracting more wealth.In these settings, the opposition to democratic land-rights reform rarely stems from fears that compensation won’t be fair. Instead the elite fear that giving the poor ownership gives them power and leverage: the power of economic opportunity and to not be exploited, and the leverage to pull children out of the fields and send them into the classroom, to start home businesses, and to be innovative.
Will the system of ownership change in the 21st century to give greater equity to the poor? • Yes • No • I do not yet know enough to judge
Demography and consumption …..demographic trends cannot be separated from consumption patterns, and that there is no chance to achieve a path of equitable and sustainable development without tackling population growth and consumption at the same time. In short, population and the environment cannot and should not be considered as two separate issues. People and the Planet by the Royal Society
This strong and long overdue pitch to bring back the “p” word into the environmental debate is most welcome. In recent decades, international attention has shifted from rapid population growth to other urgent issues, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, humanitarian crises, climate change, and good governance. But reproductive health and voluntary family planning programs are still very much needed, especially in high fertility countries, and they require political leadership and long-term financial commitment. Broader access to family planning services will be needed to accelerate the decline of high fertility rates, particularly in countries where unmet needs for contraception are high. John May, Center for Global Development
Do you expect the global society to provide leadership on family planning? • Yes • No • I do not know
