An Assessment of the Millennium Development Goals
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were the eight international development goals for the year 2015 established following the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000, following the adoption of the United Nations Millennium Declaration. All 191 United Nations member states at that time, and at least 22 international organizations, committed to help achieve the following Millennium Development Goals by 2015:
To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
To achieve universal primary education
To promote gender equality and empower women
To reduce child mortality
To improve maternal health
To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
To ensure environmental sustainability
To develop a global partnership for development
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reflect an understanding of the many interconnected factors that contribute to extreme poverty and include time-bounda and measurable targets to address income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter and exclusion—while promoting gender equality, education and environmental sustainability. The MDGs were established in order to combat fundamental issues that plagued many developing nations. These goals ranged from health and environment to economics and education.
Limitations in the MDG development process:
The MDGs were designed “inside a UN conference room” during an inter-agency technical process co-chaired by the UN Assistant Secretary-General Michael Doyle and UNDP Director of the Poverty Group Jan Vandemoortele, with no formal or informal consultations held among relevant stakeholders other than follow-up conversations with Member States and particularly developing countries of the so-called Group of 77.
Another critical point is related to the formulation of the MDGs focuses on who identified the goals and targets, how and why certain goals were chosen and what political agendas influenced the structure of the MDGs. The overall creation process of the MDG framework was driven by the triad ‘United States, Europe and Japan’, and co-sponsored by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Amin (2006).
Limitations of MDGs content:
Several authors are concerned that the MDGs fail to include political and human rights. In view, MDG targets are presented not as political but as technical problems, where the solution appears as simply increasing financial resources. A limited focus on only poverty reduction risks to obscure ‘important trade-offs and conflicts of interest’. In general, civil, political or human rights are not represented enough in the MDG framework, given they represent an important and enduring global consensus argue that a human rights orientation could have had a positive impact on monitoring and synergism within the MDG framework Ziai's (2011).
Limitations in the MDG implementation and enforcement:
One of the most often reported challenges with regards to implementation of MDGs and subsequently in the interpretation of progress reports is the reliability of data. Quantitative MDG targets also rely on epidemiological and monitoring tools that many countries lack, and even if available, data are not necessarily comparable across countries because of different compilation methodologies or definitions (Poku & Whitman, 2011). Additionally, unreliable data can also lead to miscalculated cost estimation with important financial consequences for donor and recipient countries (Saith, 2006).
MDG 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability
Deforestation has slowed, but global greenhouse gas emissions continue their upward trend.
In recent years, the net loss of forest area has slowed, due to both a slight decrease in deforestation and an increase in afforestation. Deforestation, forest degradation and poor forest management release carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.A continual rise in greenhouse gas emissions is projected to further warm the planet and cause long-lasting changes in the climate system, threatening severe and irreversible consequences for people and ecosystems.
Context:
Ozone-depleting substances have been virtually eliminated, and the ozone layer is expected to recover by the middle of this century.
Terrestrial and marine protected areas in many regions have increased substantially since 1990. In Latin America and the Caribbean, coverage of terrestrial protected areas rose from 8.8 percent to 23.4 percent between 1990 and 2014.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide have increased by over 50 percent since 1990.
In 2015, 91 percent of the global population uses an improved drinking water source, up from 76 percent in 1990. Globally, 147 countries have met the drinking water target, 95 countries have met the sanitation target and 77 countries have met both.
Since 1990, 2.1 billion people have gained access to improved sanitation, and the proportion of people practicing open defecation globally has fallen almost by half.
The proportion of the urban population living in slums in the developing regions fell from 39.4 percent to 29.7 percent between 2000 and 2014.
TARGETS
INDICATORS
Target A.
Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources
Proportion of land area covered by forest (FAO)
Ratio of area protected to maintain biological diversity to surface area (UNEP–WCMC)
Energy use (kg oil equivalent) per $1 GDP (PPP) (TEA, World Bank)
Carbon dioxide emissions per capita (UNFCCC, UNSD) and consumption of ozone-depleting CFCs (ODP tons) (UNEP-Ozone Secretariat)
Proportion of population using solid fuels (WHO)
Target B.
Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation
Proportion of population with sustainable access to an improved water source, urban and rural (UNICEF–WHO)
Proportion of population with access to improved sanitation, urban and rural (UNICEF–WHO)
Target C
Have achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers
Proportion of households with access to secure tenure (UN–HABITAT)
Evaluation
The MDGs has not given enough consideration to the potential impacts on environmental, social and economic dimensions. Environmental aspects are addressed under goal 7 but only some topics are covered, overlooking crucial issues for sustainable development. Most goals focus on the social dimension of development, e.g. MDGs 1, 2 and 6, addressing social problems such as hunger, education, equality, and communicable diseases. However, these goals are interconnected with environmental and economic factors. While some links are recognized like the importance of clean drinking water to health, others as the maintenance of environmental resources or the quality of air are not. MDG8 addresses the implementation of sustainable development but does not consider new forms of financing, technology and capacity building.
However, and important contribution is related to the development of measuring data. Several methodologies and indicators have been developed to measure progress towards the MDGs, such as the MDG indicators website, the UN Data – and the UNICEF Portal Moreover, progress towards MDG achievement can be tracked through the MDG Monitor, both globally and at the country level. Nonetheless, there still challenges and gaps regarding data and monitoring.
Limited understanding about the implications of environmental issues:
Not recognizing the interconnection between environmental issues with economic and social factors.
Overlooking local challenges, including, infrastructure, distance, security, cost, contamination.
Absent of measurements and mitigation strategies for climate change.
Limitations in the MDG implementation and enforcement:
Measuring Data and Monitoring:
o Availability and reliability of data are the most often reported challenges with regards to implementation of MDGs and subsequently in the interpretation of progress reports. Targets are based on ‘little evidence of feasibility in low-income countries (Dar & Khan, 2011; Easterly, 2009; Sachs, 2012).
o Quantitative MDG targets also rely on epidemiological and monitoring tools that many countries lack, and even if available, data are not necessarily comparable across countries because of different compilation methodologies or definitions (Poku & Whitman, 2011).
Targets:
MDGs had a focus on developing countries with funds from rich countries.
The arbitrary choice of a poverty line as well as the general use of average and proportions, makes it harder to achieve measurable progress in worst-off countries.
Financing:
Addressing the implementation of sustainable development but not considering new forms of financing, technology and capacity building.
Alternative Approach
Environmental issues as a transversal issue:
Recognize that tackling climate change is essential for sustainable development and poverty eradication.The principles on which sustainable goals should acknowledge an ecosystem governance approach and where the ecosystems and services they provide are managed, restored, and governed to support the sustainable goals should be implemented in a manner that promotes sustainable development and human wellbeing. Viable sustainability should consider all aspects of ecosystem governance that promotes integration of social and ecological processes necessary to deliver ecosystem services to meet human and environmental needs.
Future actions should include the following:
Adoption of adaptive ecosystem governance approaches, where communities and decision makers connect with, and mutually respect each other, in a fully participatory process.
Respect for ecosystem services and biodiversity through their conservation, restoration, and sustainable adaptive management that also accept the need for monitoring and social learning.
A broader valuation of ecosystem services and biodiversity that goes beyond simply defining them as tradable commodities that can be subject to a financial cost-benefit analysis for decision making.
Measuring Data:
Better data are needed for the post-2015 development agenda
Real-time data are needed to deliver better decisions faster
Geospatial data can support monitoring in many aspects of development, from health care to natural resource management.
Taking the recent developments under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) into account
Strengthening statistical capacity is the foundation for monitoring progress of the new development agenda
New technology is changing the way data are collected and disseminated
Global standards and an integrated statistics system are key elements for effective monitoring
Promoting open, easily accessible data and data literacy is key for effective use of data for development decision-making.
Countries need to report annually on the vast majority of sustainable indicators. Annual reporting will be a huge challenge, but it can be met by mobilising modern technologies, by learning from best practice and by giving data and metrics the political attention they need.
Multidimensional approach to poverty, nutrition, access to primary healthcare, reactive nitrogen flows and several governance indicators. These gaps can be filled if statistical agencies work creatively with experts from academia, civil society and business between now.
The need of an international system that can report annually of these goals and quantify the financial resources needed for a sound monitoring system to assure an appropriate monitoring and evaluation within and among countries and to conceive suitable policies and interventions, reliable, timely and internationally comparable data on the MDG indicators are of primary importance.
Accountability:
Review the normative value of the environmental obligations of states enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals.
Strong political commitment and significantly increased resources will be needed to meet the data demand for the new development agenda.
Lack of accountability exists at ministry, state, and local administration level. If we take the sustainable goals seriously the accountability needs to be strengthened at all levels.
Participation:
Active role of the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and indigenous communities in the developing of these goals.
Indigenous communities: The list of goals promotes the inclusion of indigenous communities as a powerful stakeholder, but one important aspect left out is land rights. Conservation and sustainable energy projects are major goals for these international organizations, but these interests can overlap with the perspective of development that indigenous communities have for their lands. Even if these projects are sustainable projects for conservation, they should begin from the needs of the indigenous communities and the legacy they want to leave in their lands.
Financing and Capacity building:
Encouraging funding and allocating aid effectively.
Funding continues to be needed, especially in the Least developed countries (LDCs) where environmental degradation is frequently linked to development. This also means that funding should not be given blindly for development but should demonstrate the importance of ecosystem health.
The lack of priority in funds allocation within country budget has also been a problem during MDGs.
Capacity building remains an essential component to move forward in integrating and respecting ecosystems in the context of sustainable goals. The development of skills and competences in interdisciplinary work can lead to effective local civil society that can become globally responsible.
MDG 8: Global Partnership for Development
The Global Partnership for Development is the only goal designed to be met by advanced/ developed economies in helping the developing countries achieve the first seven goals. There are 28 countries identified to meet the requirement and 13 of them were able to, highlighting gaps in funding flows. It is crucially understood as the most important goal in the matrix. However, since the goal was highly dependant on macroeconomic stability of the international financial sector, targets never realised their full potential. While other goals work on an incremental progression, the partnership goal was in constant flux given the health of the international finance system. This can be clearly seen in the disbursement of aid from 2000-2015, while overall the there was a rise in level of assistance at the end of MDG deadline, a sharp decrease in 2007 due to the global financial crisis halted the flow of funds thereby halting several projects in many different countries. This break in the availability of resources further delayed projects or in most cases restart projects from the beginning essentially tipping the cost-benefit equation to the costs. However, significant achievements have been made:
Official development assistance from developed countries increased by 66 per cent in real terms between 2000 and 2014, reaching $135.2 billion.
In 2014, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom continued to exceed the United Nations official development assistance target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income.
In 2014, 79 per cent of imports from developing to developed countries were admitted duty free, up from 65 per cent in 2000.
The proportion of external debt service to export revenue in developing countries fell from 12 per cent in 2000 to 3 per cent in 2013.
As of 2015, 95 per cent of the world’s population is covered by a mobile-cellular signal.
The number of mobile-cellular subscriptions has grown almost tenfold in the last 15 years, from 738 million in 2000 to over 7 billion in 2015.
Internet penetration has grown from just over 6 percent of the world’s population in 2000 to 43 per cent in 2015. As a result, 3.2 billion people are linked to a global network of content and applications.
Targets and the indicators for MDG8 share a level of vagueness and indetermination that set a striking difference with targets and indicators for the other MDGs. For instance, none of the MDG8 indicators designates a quantity or a time period. Unlike the other MDGs, the Millennium Declaration did not provide quantitative targets for MDG8, so the expert group would arguably not have had a mandate to set them which in turn does not effective streamline process of completion and monitoring.
MDG8 was divided in six targets and several indicators were agreed upon to judge the progress of these goals, varying progress is achieved in different regions highlighting the potential roadblocks in each:
Overseas Development Assistance: Official development assistance assists developing countries in their development efforts, including supporting their efforts to eradicate poverty and achieve the MDGs
The metrics measure the percentage of funds take in account the % contribution to the GNI of the country, the % contribution distributed amongst the social services, the proportion of tied / untied funds and a special category for least developing countries (including landlocked) and small island developing nations.
Targets for ODA were set as a percentage of GNI, not in absolute terms, when we do compare it to nominal levels we find that USA not Sweden gave the most assistance, thus, it was not capturing the effect of total contributions made. However, a recommitment to the further levels of assistance were agreed upon which helped finance more projects.
The crucial metric to be considered here is the proportion of tied vs untied funds. Even though, there were significant contributions made for the untied funds, it did not translate in practise as many monitoring agencies found out. The disbursement was halted by several donor agencies given their own contracts and requirements to be fulfilled. Furthermore, calculations the proportion of untied aid for DAC countries went up after 2000, and only after 2005 it began to come down from a peak of 91.4 percent to 83.6 percent. The aggregate picture still hides large differences among the countries, not just in the percentages of tied versus untied aid but also in the direction of the trend, as some countries have been increasing tied aid.
Market Access: Trade is crucial to the development of the developing countries which helps gain self reliance and increase revenues for expenditure on developmental needs.
The indicators on trade gauged the proportion of trade between developed and developing countries with no duty levied, percentage of tariffs for goods and services specifically for agriculture and textiles, agricultural support from the OECD countries as % of GDP and the % contribution for building trade capacity.
Within two years of the commencement of the millennium development goals, the Doha Round on Development by the WTO was kicked off to negotiate the trade agreements which was specifically targeted at reducing tariffs. Since, the WTO took over the debate around the trade tariffs and access, it is difficult to measure the success of the efforts under the MDG programme. Similarly, the failures cannot be attributed to the MDGs specifically.
Tariffs imposed by developed countries on agricultural products from developing countries have changed little since about 2004 and with respect to textiles was largely unchanged indicating no success on the metric. The use of the indicator based on “average tariff” is that it gives a lot of flexibility to destination countries to engage in the practice termed “tariff escalation,” whereby tariffs increase significantly on products at higher stages of processing.
Summing up the survey of trade-related indicators, two of them saw some progress (indicators about duty-free, quota-free access and aid for trade). Progress on the other two is nil (indicator on tariffs on developing countries’ goods) and negligible (indicator on agricultural support).
Debt: MDG8 addressed these risks, focusing in particular on the difficulties faced by the group of heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs), and on monitoring indicators of sustainable debt. International policymaking since the Millennium Declaration has sought to reduce the debt of the HIPCs, ease the process of sovereign debt restructuring, and strengthen debt surveillance and debt management capacities.
The metrics used for managing debt with respect to relief and service essentially run into two problems that have been identified:
A good amount of debt relief that is simply double counting aid and, therefore, should either be considered progress under the ODA targets or progress under debt relief, but it would certainly be unfair to count it as progress on both.
Four countries are in debt distress, 13 are at high risk and 27 at moderate risk. Moreover, 6 of the high risk countries and 15 of the moderate risk ones are countries that did reach Completion Point under HIPC, that is, received all the stock and flow cancellation available through it. This raises questions about how effective the Initiative’s design was in making debt “sustainable in the long term,” even for the limited universe of its beneficiary countries
Thus, to effectively gauge the measure one would have to delineate the effects of several debt servicing programs that have been going on for several years, these include the ones collectively agreed by the G8 since the 1980s, Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative 1996-99 and several other bilateral relief programs working aside from the MGD programme. Dispersed efforts have led to calculations errors and are debated often with respect to results from these programs.
Further indicators like the introduction of an asset and liability management framework would also record government maturity and currency fluctuations that would help give a better picture to the indicator. Overall, debt should be seen as part of a holistic system of public financial management (PFM), where revenue mobilization and productivity of expenditure are critical factors in determining debt needs and costs. Furthermore, domestic debt requires diligent monitor- ing, as it tends to be harder to track due to data gaps.
Access to Healthcare
Lack of access to essential medicines is one of the contributing factors to the countless deaths caused from both communicable and non-communicable diseases, many of which were preventable. The MDG8 relatively monitors the % populations with access to medicine on a sustainable basis in developing countries. Although the more than 50% of the populations were covered for generic medicines in developing countries overall, the prices charged were different with many countries offering them at a much higher price that the population could pay. Hence, the sole metric does not take in account the success of the access to medicines given the externalities which greatly affect the outcome. Thus, more indicators could be added to gauge a holistic understanding of the outcome.
Access to Technology
Three indicators measuring % population covered by telephone lines, internet users and cellular subscribers are used to measure the metric. Over the course of the MDG period, increased access to and use of ICTs have profoundly changed the way billions of people go about their daily lives. Growth in mobile-cellular networks and services, particularly over the last decade and a half, has allowed many people to join the information society. Most e-government services heavily depend on the penetration of these hardware installations which guide their effectiveness. However, simply attributing the penetration of ICT services should be not be used to conclude the effectiveness of e service penetration in society or digital literacy. Owning a mobile phone is one thing and using its features to conduct daily life processes like banking, commerce and tax is another. The access to technology has greatly improved with respect to the metric has shown successful results but whether the metric itself is a measure of the success of the outcome is unanswered. Other challenges to partnership have been seen in the several instances of conflicts during the 2000-2015 which have severely affected the performance of these goals.
Alternative development models concerning partnership as a goal should avoid being least explicit target, lacking quantitative and time bound benchmarks as critics of MDG Goal 8 have pointed out. Crucial indicators which also aid in financial funding such as remittances, foreign direct investment and other private and civil society funding is left unaccounted for in the process of forging partnerships between the developed and the developing world. On matters of implementation, an effective results oriented aid programme helps in providing greater accountability while inclusive participation of partners from developed and developing countries provide policy coherence with effective results.
Conclusion
The Millenium Development Goals ended in 2015 wherein, a major project of such scale and magnitude has provided effective results on all goals but further corrective action is required in order to achieve sustainable growth in the world for the future generations. The Sustainable Development Goals 2015 expanded the goals to 17 in number and cover much more than what was covered in the Millenium Development Goals giving it a broader mandate. The following learnings could be incorporated to ensure efficient delivery of goals with respect to design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation:
Participation: The need of an extensive consultative process including 70 Open Working Groups, Civil Society Organizations, thematic consultations, country consultations, participation of general public through face-to-face meetings and online mechanisms and door to door survey.
Framework: Consideration of the potential impacts on environmental, social and economic dimensions along with a detailed cost benefit analysis with financial implications for all stakeholders involved.
Inclusion and Equity has represented one of the main challenges in the MDG experience. A gender focus is clear only in MDGs 3 and 5, while it is missing throughout the other goals. Thus, a holistic participation from different groups is required to achieve sustainable growth.
Accountability must be an essential part of the framework. A few studies have underlined the problem of corruption in relation to the use of MDGs resources by governments and other organizations. This needs to be avoided in future development models.
The need of efficient planning in combination of long term planning, quick-fix solutions and short-term planning should be used to effectively tackle the challenges of the future.
Goal measurement is often too narrow, or might not identify a clear means of delivery. A strong need to scientifically valid data on measures of output but also their relation to the outcome needs to be ensured. Government reports have sometimes been criticized as false and government-driven, leading to a lack of confidence into the official reporting systems, mechanisms to ensure data credibility is of vital importance.