With 2015 less than six months away, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) are under scrutiny. The United Nations (UN) recently released its 2014 The Millennium Development Goals Report, looking at the progress being made towards achieving the targets to date.
The eight MDGs set at the beginning of the century are:
- 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
The UN’s intention in setting these targets was to help the world’s poorest people to achieve a better quality of life by 2015. As such, the Millennium Declaration’s stated aim was to establish set targets for governments which, once achieved, would help to uplift millions of people and save the lives of those vulnerable to hunger and disease.
The report shows that progress had been made, albeit in an uneven fashion and, in some areas, at a slow pace. Issues including population growth, conflicts and declining aid to poor countries make the likelihood of achieving these goals by 2015 near impossible.
The eradication of poverty certainly remains a key challenge for Sub-Saharan Africa. It is the only region in the world that has seen a steady increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty over the past 20 years, rising from 290 million in 1990 to 414 million in 2010. The World Bank has estimated that by 2015 40% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population (40% of the world’s destitute population) will still be living on less than US$1.25 a day.
However, Shantu Mukherjee, MDG Team Leader at the UN Development Programme (UNDP), says Africa’s progress in poverty alleviation was always going to be more difficult due to the very high poverty rates across the continent at the time when the MDGs were set.
But it is not all bad news. Africa has made some noticeable improvements. Mukherjee noted: “And combined with this [poverty alleviation]my colleagues have already referred to conflict related issues, there were persistent capacity gaps which overtime have gotten better, the quality of governance has also improved and so has the rates of economic growth which were stagnant for a long time prior to the 2000 period.”
In an interview with Voice of America, UNDP economist Wilmot Reeves also defended Sub-Saharan Africa’s progress, saying that governments has had to deal with issues around financial resources which “are much needed to support some of the interventions related to lagging MDGs”.
Population growth is another issue with which Africa has had to contend. Holly Newby, Head of Data Analysis at UNICEF, the UN’s children’s fund, says: “Sub-Saharan Africa has also had to deal with challenges in terms of its population growth and so as you look through this report it’s worth reflecting on that as you examine certain indicators. Sub-Saharan Africa has actually made remarkable strides in reaching larger numbers of its population and it’s been doing that by swimming upstream, trying to build more schools, establish or strengthen infrastructure to be able to reach the demands of an ever larger population and that is something that similar other regions haven’t had to face.”
With 2015 just around the corner, global bodies are now looking to table a post-2015 agenda to continue driving progress. As Reeves says: “The post-2015 development agenda has been able to at least adopt an approach where you have a wider stakeholder participation in the crafting of the post-2015 development agenda.”
The UN will be releasing a report specifically focused on the MDGs in Africa within the next few months.
