| By Gavin Chait,
on 07 January 2007
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 Poverty alleviation requires measurement
They are, briefly:
- Goal 1: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by halving the proportion of people who earn less than $ 1 a day
- Goal 2: achieve universal primary education for children everywhere, both girls and boys
- Goal 3: promote gender equality and empower women by eliminating educational disparities between boys and girls
- Goal 4: reduce child mortality by two-thirds for those under five.
- Goal 5: improve maternal health by reducing the maternal mortality rate by two-thirds
- Goal 6: combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other illnesses by halting the spread of HIV and reversing the incidence of malaria and other illnesses
- Goal 7: ensure environmental sustainability by halving the number of people without access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation
- Goal 8: develop a global partnership for development through a global non-discriminatory trading and financial system, tariff and quota reductions, debt reduction, affordable medication, work creation, and technology transfer
Many of these are very broad goals and significantly less defined than indicated above. In 2004 Bjorn Lomborg, working in Denmark, collected eight of the world’s top economists (including three Nobel laureates) and asked them to evaluate the most important development tasks. They started from the premise that there is a finite amount of money for development and so certain goals must be prioritised in the short term which will allow for sufficient economic growth to complete the list.
Their goals came out (in order of priority) as:
- Goal 1: control HIV / AIDS transmission and spread
- Goal 2: provide micronutrients to reduce malnutrition and hunger
- Goal 3: liberalise trade by reducing subsidies and tariffs
- Goal 4: control the spread of malaria
- Goal 5: development of new, low-cost, agricultural technologies
- Goal 6: improve access to community-managed water supply and sanitation
- Goal 7: create small-scale water technology to improve livelihoods
- Goal 8: produce research on water productivity in food production
- Goal 9: lower the cost of starting a new business
The Copenhagen Consensus was published as a measurable yardstick. Thus far the Millennium Development Goals are falling far short of their target; not least of which is a failure to take the South African government to task over their pathetic response to AIDS.
As The Economist says of the UN, “denouncing bad behaviour by states will always be easier for a private body than for an inter-governmental agency.”
And so it is significantly easier for a private measurement organisation, like Whythawk, to offer an opinion on how well development organisations are meeting their self-appointed tasks than it will be for them to do so themselves.
Development without a goal is directionless. A goal without impartial measurement will never be achieved.
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Keywords : water, aids, malaria, maternal mortality, education, technology, sanitation, hunger, copenhagen consensus, millennium development goals, subsidies, tariffs, measurement |
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