Claudio Schuftan from the People’s Health Movement (PHM) makes it very clear that he is an MDG skeptic. And he strongly persuades his readers to question the ‘deficit-filling approach’ to poverty, malnutrition and health. He takes it even further, arguing that the MDGs do not address the international political power disparity, but merely create more good-looking but meaningless statistics. Schuftan says a post-MDGs architecture should be crafted as soon as possible. This approach should...   read more >>

Anticipation was building up around the UN headquarters yesterday morning. The traffic was, too. With almost the entire east side of the city in lock-down, roaring helicopters above our heads and an NYPD checkpoint on every corner, the arrival of President Obama was hard to miss. ‘The President is here on some business’, a police officer answered dutifully when asked what Obama was doing here. Bystanders, trying to catch a glimpse of their leader, didn’t really know why he was here either....   read more >>

So, the MDG summit is over, and all those with an interest in the outcomes will be taking stock and deciding if, on balance, the event has been a success. They’ll be scanning the outcomes document, the transcripts of speeches and news reports diligently, measuring how many times their particular issue is mentioned, and trying to figure out what it all means for them. My prediction is that most will feel increasingly short-changed as the excitement of the event wears off. Those who wanted...   read more >>

Whatever we think about the US or about the MDGs, a speech by an American president is always worth analyzing. Development, in the end, is about power and power relations. And the US is still the greatest power in the world. On Wednesday, the final day of the MDG summit, Barack Obama spoke to the assembled world leaders in the big hall of the United Nations. His speech was certainly not one of the worst. On the contrary; it contained some interesting phrases. Obama said he hereby announ...   read more >>

Ok, I admit it – I have little interest in the Millennium Development Goals, despite working in the development arena since 1978. Do I need medical or psychological help? Is there something seriously wrong with me? Don’t I have a heart? Picture me and a few other ugly ducklings standing at the edge of the dance hall while Bono, Bill Gates and the rest of the in-crowd party the night away in New York City – that just about sums it up. But maybe my lonely and miserable existence is coming...   read more >>

The Millennium Development Goals have provided a forum for discussion on poverty and development at the international level. They have contributed to bringing the devastation of poverty and inequality to the forefront of the international arena. Yet they have failed to maintain a holistic human rights approach or to hold developing and developed countries to the same standards of rigorous evaluation in relationship to their commitments to those goals. For example, MDG 8 intended to hold...   read more >>

Talk about the importance of gender equality and women’s empowerment in all the MGDs abounds. It is a highly recommended principle, although very few arrive at the specifics of programming and implementation. Beyond the talk there is frenzy over what to do about reducing maternal mortality rates. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has announced a 'Global strategy for women and children's health'. The Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting is dedicating an entire track to women's and girls'...   read more >>

Last Sunday, my activities centred around Central Park. It was such a perfect day, sunny and warm. An Indian Summer. I started from the stiff and stuffy Upper East Side, where the only people you see during the week are cute little ‘Caucasian’ white boys and girls being pushed around in high-tech strollers by Latin nursemaids, their mothers probably very busy – maybe having their next botox shot? I was glad to wander into the green of Central Park, even hearing that sound of cri...   read more >>

The Millennium Development Goals claim our attention as today’s pro-poor aid agenda. Yet going by who gets what and from whom, the world’s real agenda looks distinctly pro-rich. The MDGs have been a singular success as a vehicle for many in the aid-and-development sector. They furnish a liturgy for a broad church, encompassing a range of matters, from school attendance to clean water to the health of mothers and children. Bundled together, these problems attract a diverse spectrum of iss...   read more >>

Some of the criticisms directed to the MDGs when they were agreed were about their minimalist nature. Many observers saw them as a perhaps too narrow distillation of the outcomes of the conferences of the 1990s. So the issue was: after all the effort that went into agreeing those conference documents, now we have to agree what part of them we will do. It is quite disappointing that, in spite of the many concessions that it took to come down to such a minimalist agenda, progress is so limite...   read more >>

It seems New York City provides a fitting backdrop to the UN MDG summit. The city has many contrasting faces, as do the summit and the MDG-related side events. As the official conference kicked off yesterday only a few blocks away, I found myself in the basement of the Salvation Army, where civil society representatives gave an overview of their expectations of the summit. They are low, it immediately became clear. Very low. Social Watch’s Roberto Bissio critically assessed the alre...   read more >>

I am now in a hilarious meeting. It is called the High Level Side-Event about ‘Innovative Financing for the MDGs’. It started by refusing entry to a group of forty people – journalists, NGOs, delegations – for half an hour. Nobody knew why. When we saw Hillary Clinton rush by, surrounded by a lot of security people, the way was cleared. In Conference Room 2 of the UN buildings, about 300 people are now sitting, listening … but hardly hearing anything: there is a technical failure! The l...   read more >>

Already, before the MDG summit has even kicked off, the German chancellor Angela Merkel has pointed out that the 0.7 ODA target will not be achieved during her term (ending in 2013). At least she deserves credit for her honesty… Goals are goals. Politicians fail to reach their goals on a daily basis, and one could even say that it is acceptable to not reach one’s own goals – at least when one is honest about it. Come on, you might say – we ordinary people sometimes also fail to reach our...   read more >>

UN summits follow a more or less predetermined route. Heads of state and government and heads of major international organizations all come and make their declarations. In most of them, there is nothing really new or interesting. Now and then, however, some interesting sentences come out in official declarations and in side events. Let me mention three after this first day of the summit. First of all, Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN, clearly pointed to the need to look beyond...   read more >>

The end of the first day of the MDG-fest at the UN General Assembly and everyone seems to be promising more and better partnerships: between the public, private and civil sectors; between international agencies (the IMF and ILO had a love-in in Oslo last week, but I see that their report has separate IMF and ILO chapters as they could not agree on a joint text); and, between the rich and the poor worlds. But, from what I saw at the side events, the African and Asian delegates seem to be mai...   read more >>

The UN Secretary-General’s report speaks firmly on keeping international commitments and this week’s Summit will no doubt produce some strengthening of global commitment towards the MDGs. This is good and important for welfare in poor countries. But, we sometimes forget that development aid is a second-best solution. Countries receive aid to meet financing gaps and in doing so lay themselves open to outside interference in policy processes, since the aid is effectively conditional and t...   read more >>

Some countries stage high-level side events to show their commitment to the MDGs or otherwise underline their own priorities. Today I went to one, organized by the German government and presided by German chancellor Angela Merkel herself. She moderated a forum with Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi, World Bank president Robert Zoellick, Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, and German minister of Economic Cooperation and Development Dirk Niebel. It was not exciting and not a ver...   read more >>

Possibly one of the greatest steps towards the advancement of women’s rights over the last decade has been the expansion of primary education. But on its own, this is not adequate to ensure gender equality or empower women. The position of gender and women’s issues in the MDG framework is significant, yet constraining. MDG3, on gender equality and empowering women, has targets and indicators that are weak proxies for the goal. In The Lancet Commission on the MDGs, by the London Internat...   read more >>

I am in New York for the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). On Monday morning, the delegates from the UN member states will officially finalize the talks about how the targets set for 2015 can be met, despite the lack of progress in some (others would say many) respects and despite the setbacks that the financial and other crises have caused. Contrary to other summits – the most notorious: Copenhagen, climate change – this will be a ritual; the final statement was agreed...   read more >>

This UN summit is extremely important, even for the billion and a half extremely poor people in the world. Since I am known for being very critical of the poverty reduction policies, this statement may surprise. Let me explain what I mean. Poverty is not a problem exclusive to poor people. It is the problem of a society where income distribution is biased. In today’s world, there are no countries with only very poor people, without extremely rich elites and without non-poor people. In to...   read more >>

The big issue for the MDG summit, the 'big push' to 2015 and even the post-2015 debates (there's a newly agreed UN summit due in Sept 2013) should really be a focus on equity and on the poorest. Why? Because nearly three-quarters of the world's poor now live in middle-income countries. The MDGs have focused donors in particular on the poor over the last decade. But what if the poor have 'moved'? Popular understandings of global poverty are based on a false premise, that poor people all l...   read more >>

There are only five years left to deliver the targets set by the Millennium Development Goals for poverty, education, gender, health and the environment. The MDGs have had success so far: generating global consensus, supporting advocacy, mobilizing resources and improving the monitoring of development investment. But it is likely that most goals will miss their targets, and some are in serious trouble. Much attention will now be focused on accelerating progress towards 2015, but some should...   read more >>

The MDG Summit happening in New York next week is generating a lot of news on the need for a more effective international effort to support the efforts of poor people around the world to improve their lives. The draft summit outcomes document contains something for everybody: intellectual property rights, microfinance, anti-retrovirals, and higher development assistance budgets, to name just a few. But the overall brand of the Summit is that we need an 'MDG rescue plan' to 'keep the promise...   read more >>