The Trouble with the MDGs: Confronting Expectations of Aid and Development Success

Abstract

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The MDGs are a set of quantitative, time-bound targets for indicators such as poverty, education and mortality in developing countries adopted unanimously by the UN in 2000. However, the rates of progress required by many of the goals are at the edges of or beyond historical precedent. At the same time, there appear to be limits to the degree to which aid can contribute to development outcomes. Estimates of the 'cost' of reaching the MDGs are nevertheless frequently misinterpreted to mean that a certain quantity of aid-such as the oft-cited $50 billion-could cause the Goals to be met. Despite many benefits of the MDGs, there has been little discussion so far of potential costs of the specific form taken by these goals, especially the creation of unreasonable expectations about what is achievable in a short time frame and about the role of aid in the development process. Many countries making extraordinarily rapid progress on MDG indicators, due in large part to aid, will nonetheless not reach the MDGs. Unrealistic targets thus may turn successes into perceptions of failure, serving to undermine future constituencies for aid (in donors) and reform (in recipients). This would be unfortunate given the vital role of aid and reform in the development process and the need for long-term, sustained aid commitments. Though goal-setting can be useful, these particular goals might be better viewed not as practical targets but instead as valuable reminders of the stark contrast between the world we have and the world we want, and as a call to redouble our search for interventions to close the gap more rapidly.

What you count is what you target: the implications of maternal death classification for tracking progress towards reducing maternal mortality in developing countries

“…At present, progress towards MDG-5 is seriously off target. 3,4 Between 1990 and 2005 there was a decline in maternal mortality across Latin America and the Caribbean, with the MMR decreasing from 179 maternal deaths per 100 000 live births to 132 per 100 000, and across Asia, with a decrease from 410 to 329 per 100 000. However, MMRs in sub-Saharan Africa have remained high, at over 900 maternal deaths per 100 000 live births.…”

Will Sub-Saharan Africa Meet the Millennium Development Goals and Does it Matter?

“…In addition, one should consider economic growth rates: in 2007 the Africa Progress Panel suggested that the region needs an annual GDP growth rate of 7%, up from its existing 5.4% if it is to make "…substantial inroads into poverty reduction" (Clemens, 2007). In fact, an annual growth rate of 5.4% in itself is impressive: should it last until 2015 it would be in the ISSN 1948-5433 2013 top 1/5 of GDP growth rates during the period 1965-2005 for all regions.…”

Abolishing inequity, a necessity for poverty reduction and the realisation of child mortality targets

“…Furthermore, the global success in reaching the first MDG can to a large extent be attributed to the tremendous economic development in East Asia over the past two decades (tables 1–4). 3 China alone has made a major contribution to the achievement of MDG 1. However, not much has happened in Africa.…”

“…In countries like Kenya, Nigeria and Zambia, the ratio of people living on less than US$1.25 a day has actually increased (table 4). 2 3 This raises the question whether achieving MDG 1 was due to the MDG effort or was just the result of inevitable development as the most populous country on Earth reached a developmental tipping point. This suggestion has both positive and negative implications—positive in the sense that once the economy of a developing society reaches a critical mass the rate of poverty will decrease as a result, and negative in the sense that world community efforts may ultimately be irrelevant as macroeconomics have a dynamic of their own.…”