Brookings: Experts - John McArthur

To End Poverty Worldwide, Fix African Agriculture First

John McArthur — Tue, 28 May 2013 12:42:00 -0400

The public chorus to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030 now includes U.S. President Barack Obama, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and Bono. The backdrop is extremely promising since the developing world has already cut the share of people living in absolute poverty – that is, on less than the equivalent of $1.25 a day – by half since 1990. At a consistent rate of progress, the other half could well cross the line in another 20 years too.

But, as my colleague Laurence Chandy and his co-authors recently pointed out, the distance to crossing the absolute-poverty line varies tremendously by region. Most of China has already crossed the $1.25 threshold, and India has a huge share of its population poised to make the leap next. Sub-Saharan Africa has the farthest to go, despite recent progress, since a large proportion of its population still lives so far below $1.25 per day, often at half that level of income.

Most of Africa’s poorest people live on small farms in rural areas, so those places will likely form the final frontier of the global quest to end extreme poverty. Although fast-growing cities have gained attention for their role in fighting poverty, including in the World Bank’s latest Global Monitoring Report, it is increases in rural productivity, especially agriculture, that are typically a fundamental driver of the urbanization process.

There are grounds for optimism. Growing academic evidence highlights agriculture’s unique role in helping to reduce extreme poverty. For example, an important 2011 paper by economists Luc Christiaensen, Lionel Demery and Jesper Kuhl shows that agriculture is roughly three times more effective at reducing extreme poverty than non-agricultural sectors.

There has also been a global renaissance of attention on the need for an African Green Revolution, driven by both public and private investments in a manner that respects local community structures. The World Economic Forum’s Grow Africa initiative, which convened last week in Cape Town, offers a potential high-impact platform, bringing together investors and governments to launch practical joint strategies at scale.

Complementary investments in transport infrastructure, irrigation, farmer credit and input support systems (e.g. for fertilizer and seeds) were essential to Asia’s 20th century green revolutions, which laid the foundation for that region’s subsequent economic breakthroughs. The same basic approach, updated for today’s social and environmental realities, can help to ensure that Africa’s long-term economic success is equally, if not more, robust.

The sooner the process starts, the faster the world gets to the finish line on extreme poverty.

Authors

John McArthur

Publication: The Globe and Mail

Image Source: © Philimon Bulawayo / Reuters

Good Things Grow in Scaled Packages: Africa's Agricultural Challenge in Historical Context

John McArthur — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:42:00 -0400

INTRODUCTION

In recent years agriculture has experienced a renaissance of attention among economists and policymakers, especially those focused on sub-Saharan Africa. This heightened attention has been driven partly by research insights, partly by policy initiatives, and partly by a recognition that governments and major international development institutions had been neglecting the issue for many years. It has also been motivated by emerging trends in particular countries like Malawi, which implemented an ambitious small-holder subsidy program starting in 2005 and subsequently registered its first two consecutive years with average cereal yields above two tons per hectare in 2009 and 2010, according to recent Word Bank data.

One indicator of the renaissance is a sizeable increase in official development assistance (ODA) directed towards agriculture. ODA for agriculture was consistently in the range of $4 billion to $5 billion for the decade before 2006. Since then, it has experienced a significant jump, reaching more than $8 billion in 2010. Concurrently average African cereal yields per hectare experienced a slight uptick, rising above 1.3 tons per hectare for the first time in 2009, after oscillating in the range of 0.9-1.2 t/ha for more than thirty years since 1975. It remains to be seen whether these yield increases reflect the beginnings of structural change.

Africa’s average yields still remain much lower than those in any other region. Although Africa’s total factor productivity in agriculture is estimated to have increased in recent decades its food production per capita remains essentially unchanged since 1960. Continued stagnation implies fast-growing costs in terms of lives affected, as the region’s population is slated to surpass one billion people by 2017 and approach two billion by 2050, according to the U.N. population division’s medium projections. A number of recent papers have underscored the major role of agriculture in reducing poverty and accelerating economic growth, so the stagnant trends have important macroeconomic implications. Esther Duflo and colleagues have also investigated questions related to farmer choices around the key input of fertilizer, motivated significantly by arguments surrounding the role of subsidies.

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John McArthur

Image Source: © Mohamed Abd El Ghany / Reuters

The Declaration of the Millennium Development Goals

John McArthur — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

More than a decade after the establishment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ample confusion persists regarding their genesis. In particular, many people misunderstand the relationship between the contents of the September 2000 UN Millennium Declaration and the original MDG Targets that were extracted from that Declaration. As recently as 2012, I have heard senior global policy figures state a belief that, “The Millennium Declaration did not establish any quantitative targets. Those were set afterwards.” This is not correct. All of the MDGs’ original formal Targets were established in the Millennium Declaration.

The roots of the misunderstanding probably lie in the U.S. government’s stance from mid-2001, when the MDGs were first used as a policy term, through September 2005, when President Bush first used the words “Millennium Development Goals” in public. During the interim period, U.S. officials would commonly state that, “The United States supports the goals of the Millennium Declaration but not the Millennium Development Goals,” or that “The United States supports Goals 1 through 7 but not Goal 8.” When looking at the actual contents of the Millennium Declaration and the original MDG Targets, neither statement is logical.

The following describes the issues through the form of an FAQ structure.

1. Which Targets were taken directly from the Millennium Declaration?
All of the original MDG Targets were taken directly from the Millennium Declaration. Following the September 2000 Millennium Summit, the UN General Assembly mandated Secretary-General Kofi Annan to prepare a long-term roadmap towards the implementation of the Millennium Declaration. Annan in turn commissioned Assistant Secretary-General Michael Doyle to coordinate a process to extract the development-related outcomes of the Millennium Declaration and thereby crystallize the priorities for follow-up.

In working through the prose of world leaders’ commitments embedded in the body of the Millennium Declaration, Doyle and his team (which included people like Jan Vandemoortele of UNDP and others from UNICEF, the OECD, World Bank, IMF, UNFPA and later WHO) identified a subset of 18 politically agreed commitments, which they categorized under eight overarching “Goals.” These 18 commitments were labeled as “Targets.” Ten out of the 18 Targets were quantitative in nature and nine out of ten set a deadline for 2015, the exception being the slum dweller Target for 2020. Table 1 lists the original 18 MDG Targets next to the relevant passage(s) from the Millennium Declaration. [The 18 Targets were later expanded to be 21, based on 2005 intergovernmental agreements, as described under point #6 below.] Appendix 1 includes the complete Development section of the Millennium Declaration.

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Own the Goals: What the Millennium Development Goals Have Accomplished

John McArthur — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:11:00 -0500

For more than a decade, the Millennium Development Goals -- a set of time-bound targets agreed on by heads of state in 2000 -- have unified, galvanized, and expanded efforts to help the world's poorest people. The overarching vision of cutting the amount of extreme poverty worldwide in half by 2015, anchored in a series of specific goals, has drawn attention and resources to otherwise forgotten issues. The MDGs have mobilized government and business leaders to donate tens of billions of dollars to life-saving tools, such as antiretroviral drugs and modern mosquito nets. The goals have promoted cooperation among public, private, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), providing a common language and bringing together disparate actors. In his 2008 address to the UN General Assembly, the philanthropist Bill Gates called the goals "the best idea for focusing the world on fighting global poverty that I have ever seen."

The goals will expire on December 31, 2015, and the debate over what should come next is now in full swing. This year, a high-level UN panel, co-chaired by British Prime Minister David Cameron, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, will put forward its recommendations for a new agenda. The United States and other members of the UN General Assembly will then consider these recommendations, with growing powers, such as Brazil, China, India, and Nigeria, undoubtedly playing a major role in forging any new agreement. But prior to deciding on a new framework, the world community must evaluate exactly what the MDG effort has achieved so far.

WORKING ON A DREAM

The MDGs are not a monolithic policy following a single trajectory. Ultimately, they are nothing more than goals, established by world leaders and subsequently reaffirmed on multiple occasions. The MDGs were not born with a plan, a budget, or a specific mapping out of responsibilities. Many think of the MDGs as the UN's goals, since the agreements were established at UN summits and UN officials have generally led the follow-up efforts for coordination and reporting. But the reality is much more complicated. No single individual or organization is responsible for achieving the MDGs. Instead, countless public, private, and nonprofit actors-working together and independently, in developed and developing countries -- have furthered the goals. Amid this complexity, the achievements toward reaching the MDGs are all the more impressive. The goals have brought the diffuse international development community closer together.

Before the MDGs were crafted, there was no common framework for promoting global development. After the Cold War ended, many rich countries cut their foreign aid budgets and turned their focus inward, on domestic priorities. In the United States, for example, the foreign aid budget hit an all-time low in 1997, at 0.09 percent of gross national income. Meanwhile, throughout the 1990s, institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) encouraged developed and developing countries to scale back spending on public programs-in the name of government efficiency-as a condition for receiving support.

The results were troubling. Africa suffered a generation of stagnation, with rising poverty and child deaths and drops in life expectancy. Economic crises and the threat of growing inequality plagued Asia and Latin America. The antiglobalization movement gained such force that in November and December 1999, at what has come to be called "the Battle in Seattle," street protesters forced the World Trade Organization to cancel major meetings midstream.

The suspicions on the part of civil society carried over into policy debates. In the late 1990s, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development proposed "international development goal" benchmarks for donor efforts. The OECD's proposal was later co-signed by leaders of the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN. In response, Konrad Raiser, then head of the World Council of Churches, hardly a fire-breathing radical, wrote UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to convey astonishment and disappointment that Annan had endorsed a "propaganda exercise for international finance institutions whose policies are widely held to be at the root of many of the most grave social problems facing the poor all over the world."

That proposal never got off the ground, but the international community made other progress in the lead-up to 2000 that helped set the groundwork for the MDGs. Most notably, G-8 leaders took a major step forward when they crafted a debt-cancellation policy at their 1999 summit in Cologne, Germany. Under this new policy, countries could receive debt relief on the condition that they allocated savings to education or health. This helped reorient governments toward spending in social sectors after many years of cutbacks.

At the 2000 UN Millennium Summit, which was the largest gathering of world leaders to date, heads of state accepted that they needed to work together to assist the world's poorest people. Looking at the challenges of the new century, all the UN member states agreed on a set of measurable, time-bound targets in the Millennium Declaration. In 2001, these targets were organized into eight MDGs: 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; and forge global partnerships among different countries and actors to achieve development goals. Each goal was further broken down into more specific targets. For example, the first goal involves cutting in half "between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day."

In practical terms, the MDGs were actually launched in March 2002, at the UN International Conference on Financing for Development, in Monterrey, Mexico. The attendees, including heads of state, finance ministers, and foreign ministers, agreed that developed countries should step in with support mechanisms and adequate financial aid to help poor countries committed to good governance meet the MDG targets. Crucially, leaders set a benchmark for burden sharing when they urged "developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) as official development assistance to developing countries." At the time of the conference, the 22 official OECD donor countries allocated an average of 0.22 percent of GNI to aid. Thus, working toward a 0.7 target implied more than tripling total global support. The Monterrey conference established the MDGs as the first global framework anchored in an explicit, mutually agreed-on partnership between developed and developing countries.

THE GLOBAL CONVERSATION

These historic intergovernmental agreements have inspired much debate. Some NGO leaders, including participants in the annual World Social Forum, distrusted any agreement that involved international financial institutions and was negotiated behind closed doors. Human rights activists were dismayed that the MDGs excluded targets for good governance, which they considered a contributor to development and a key outcome unto itself. Some environmental activists were bothered by the narrow formulation of the targets, which ignored major issues, such as climate change, land degradation, ocean management, and air pollution.

To be sure, the MDG framework is imperfect. Several issues, such as gender equality and environmental sustainability, are defined too narrowly. The education goal is limited to the completion of primary school, overlooking concerns about the quality of learning and secondary school enrollment levels. In addition, some academics, such as the economist William Easterly, argue that the remarkable ambition of the goals is unfair to the poorest countries, which have the furthest to go to meet the targets, and minimizes what progress those countries do achieve. Sure enough, if the child survival goal were to cut mortality by half, instead of by two-thirds, 72 developing countries would already have met the target by 2011. Instead, the two-thirds goal has been achieved by only 20 developing countries so far. In addition, the MDGs' emphasis on human development issues, such as education and health, sometimes downplays the importance of investments in energy and infrastructure that support economic growth and job creation.

Nonetheless, the framework has provided a global rallying point. In 2002, with a mandate from Annan and Mark Malloch Brown, then the administrator of the UN Development Program, the economist Jeffrey Sachs launched the UN Millennium Project, which brought together hundreds of experts from around the world from academia, business, government, and civil-society organizations to construct policy plans for achieving the goals. Sachs also tirelessly lobbied government leaders in both developed and developing countries to expand key programs, especially in health and agriculture, in order to meet the MDG targets.

In the lead-up to the 2005 G-8 summit, in Gleneagles, Scotland, advocacy organizations worldwide championed the MDGs. In developing countries, NGO leaders, such as Amina Mohammed, Kumi Naidoo, and Salil Shetty, encouraged civil-society leaders to hold their governments accountable for meeting the goals. In developed countries, organizations such as ONE, co-founded by the activist Jamie Drummond, the rock star Bono, and others, petitioned politicians and conducted public awareness campaigns to demand that world leaders step up their efforts to meet the targets. At the summit, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, then British chancellor of the exchequer, put the MDGs and foreign aid commitments at the top of the agenda. Leaders at Gleneagles committed to increasing global aid by $50 billion by 2010 and set the groundwork for larger commitments to be made by 2015. However, one powerful player on the world stage, the United States, remained hesitant to embrace the MDG agenda.

PLAYERS ON THE BENCH

U.S. President George W. Bush launched the Millennium Challenge initiative in 2002, promising a 50 percent increase in U.S. foreign aid within three years, with money going to countries committed to good governance. The initiative drew inspiration from the MDGs, as the name suggests, but confusingly, it did not directly link to the targets. Ten months later, in his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush launched the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which has dramatically improved access to AIDS treatment in the developing world. This program was in many ways in line with the MDG effort but did not explicitly link to the goals. Bush even endorsed the UN Millennium Declaration and the Monterrey agreements, but he refused to support the MDGs, largely because his administration viewed them as UN-dictated aid quotas.

Holding a similar view, State Department officials regularly claimed that they supported the targets of the Millennium Declaration but not the MDGs, despite the fact that the MDG targets were drawn directly from the Millennium Declaration. U.S.-UN tensions over the Iraq war were a critical backdrop, with the Bush administration reticent to support a major UN initiative. Washington's aversion was so strong that many U.S. advocacy groups avoided using the term "Millennium Development Goals" for fear of losing influence. When John Bolton became the U.S. ambassador to the UN in August 2005, one of his first actions was to suggest deleting all references to the MDGs in the drafted agreement of the upcoming UN World Summit. The subsequent uproar from other countries and U.S. media outlets forced Washington to modify its position. In his summit speech, Bush finally endorsed the MDGs, using the phrase "Millennium Development Goals" publicly for the first time.

By refusing to directly engage with the MDGs in their early years, the United States missed an opportunity to highlight its contributions to development efforts and foster international goodwill. In the early years of this century, the United States helped revolutionize global health, a central pillar of the MDGs, first through Bush's AIDS initiative and later through efforts on malaria and other deadly diseases. Furthermore, by resisting a project on which most of the world was actively collaborating, Washington missed easy opportunities to build political capital for solving much thornier and divisive international issues.

Diplomatic tensions have subsided under the Obama administration, which has given much stronger rhetorical support to the MDGs and has continued the previous administration's basic development policies, in addition to launching a major initiative to reduce poverty by supporting small farms around the world. Nevertheless, many officials in Washington remain either skeptical or disengaged when it comes to the MDGs, most likely because of a long-standing aversion to fixed foreign aid spending, especially when defined by an international agreement. This fear, however, is baseless. The MDGs do not dictate any aid commitments, and the only related figure, the 0.7 aid target, which countries agreed to work toward in Monterrey in 2002, was endorsed by Bush. It was only later that some countries, such as the United Kingdom, made timetables to meet this aid target.

The World Bank has similarly missed out. Although the bank has championed the framework at senior political levels, it has not adequately facilitated MDG efforts on the ground. Early resistance was in part due to bureaucratic resentment of the UN for its having been given such a prominent role on development issues. In addition, as an institution dominated by economists, the bank is prone to prioritize economic reforms over investment in social sectors. Even more, there is widespread distrust among the bank's staff that donor countries will provide adequate financing for the MDGs. Such concerns are not without merit, as the G-8 ended up falling more than $10 billion short on its Africa pledges for 2010 alone.

Nevertheless, the bank, as a main interlocutor with the developing world, should have helped poor countries assess how they could achieve the MDGs and sounded the alarm about donor financing gaps. Furthermore, the bank has a self-serving reason to get onboard: the MDGs spurred a major budgetary expansion for the International Development Association, the branch of the bank devoted to supporting the poorest countries. Fortunately, the United States and the World Bank are coming around on the MDGs, attracted by the proven success of the framework.

IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

As of late 2010, five years before the deadline, the world had already met the overarching MDG of cutting extreme poverty by half. The estimated share of the developing-world population living on less than $1.25 per day (the technical MDG measurement of extreme poverty) had dropped from 43 percent in 1990 to roughly 21 percent in 2010. This statistic is somewhat skewed by progress that was under way in China and other Asian countries long before the MDGs were adopted. The framework is not solely responsible for all of the advancements of the past 12 years. Many other forces, such as the expansion of global markets and the creation of groundbreaking health and communications technologies, have helped the developing world. Moreover, the goals relating to hunger, sanitation, and the environment have not been met. Poverty reduction, however, has progressed in every region since 2000. Even excluding China from the global calculation, the world's share of impoverished people fell from 37 percent in 1990 to 25 percent in 2008, and forthcoming data should show an even greater drop.

Most important, the MDGs have kick-started progress where it was lacking, especially in Africa, where unprecedented economic growth and poverty reduction are now taking place. From 1981 to 1999, extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 52 percent of the population to 58 percent. But since the launch of the MDGs, it has declined sharply, to 48 percent in 2008. Much of this was likely driven by MDG-backed investments in healthier and better-educated work forces in the region. The global MDG campaign has also prompted support for small subsistence and cash-crop farms, which has boosted growth in many low-income countries, such as Malawi.

Primary education rates have increased around the world, too, with South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa experiencing particularly big jumps in enrollment. Much of this has been the result of funding from MDG-linked initiatives, such as the Global Partnership for Education, launched in 2002 by the World Bank and other development organizations to help poor countries "address the large gaps they face in meeting education MDG 2 and 3, in areas of policy, capacity, data, finance." These same efforts have helped nearly every world region achieve gender parity in classrooms.

The greatest MDG successes undoubtedly concern health. The MDGs have invigorated multilateral institutions, such as the GAVI Alliance (formerly called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), which seeks to achieve MDGs "by focusing on performance, outcomes and results." The goals have also inspired a huge increase in private-sector aid. Ray Chambers, a respected philanthropist and co-founder of a New York private equity firm, first learned of the goals in 2005. Since then, working with Sachs and others, Chambers has coordinated a worldwide coalition of policy, business, and NGO leaders in an effort to help the developing world meet the goal for malarial treatment and prevention. Thanks in part to this global effort, malaria-related mortality has dropped by approximately 25 percent since 2000, with most of those gains probably occurring since 2005. Many pharmaceutical companies have also put forth major efforts to make their medicines more widely available in poor countries, and new initiatives are continuing to take shape. The MDG Health Alliance, founded in 2011, is comprised of business and NGO leaders around the world working toward the MDG health targets, including the elimination of mother-to-child HIV transmission.

The combined results of these campaigns are remarkable. For example, in Senegal, child mortality has plummeted by half since 2000. In Cambodia, it has dropped by 60 percent. Rwanda has recorded a ten percent average annual reduction since 2000, one of the fastest declines in history. Even China has seen a significant decrease in child deaths, possibly because the expanded global emphasis on health has encouraged the country's policymakers to pay more attention to relevant issues. Overall, despite rapid global population growth, there has been a decrease in children dying worldwide before their fifth birthdays, from 11.7 million in 1990 to 9.4 million in 2000 and 6.8 million in 2011.

No issue has been more closely interconnected with the MDGs than the HIV/AIDS treatment campaign. In 2000, nearly 30 million people were infected, the vast majority in Africa, where only approximately 10,000 people were in treatment and over one million people were dying every year from the disease. The next year, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development publicly deemed large-scale AIDS treatment in Africa impossible. Undeterred, Annan launched the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which aims to achieve "long-term outcome and impact results related to the Millennium Development Goals."

Spurred by the launch of the MDGs, Jim Yong Kim, then head of the World Health Organization's HIV/AIDS department, introduced the "3 by 5" initiative in 2003, which aimed to have three million people living with AIDS in the developing world receiving treatment by 2005. By the end of 2005, only 1.3 million people were receiving treatment-fewer than half of the target. But thanks to the interwoven AIDS-MDG campaign, the notion of service delivery targets has sunk in globally, helping expand AIDS treatment by orders of magnitude: also in 2005, the G-8 and the UN General Assembly endorsed a target of universal access to treatment by 2010, backed by major financial commitments. The MDG movement has expanded the world's ambitions in tackling health crises and made extraordinary progress. In 2011, more than eight million people worldwide were receiving AIDS treatment.

NEXT-GENERATION GOALS

The MDGs have proved that with concentration and effort, even the most persistent global problems can be tackled. The post-2015 goals should remain focused on eliminating the multiple dimensions of extreme poverty, but they also need to address emerging global realities. These new challenges include the worsening environmental pressures affecting the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, the growing number of middle-income countries with tremendous internal poverty challenges, and rapidly spreading noncommunicable diseases.

The new goals also need to be matched with resources. Without the Monterrey agreements of 2002 and the financial commitments made at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, the MDGs might well have faded from the international agenda. It is crucial that the post-2015 negotiations not be left solely to foreign and development ministries. Finance ministries will need an equal say on many of the most central issues and therefore need to be included from the beginning. Other relevant ministries, such as those that deal with health and environmental issues, should be consulted regularly. Additionally, in preparation for 2015, multilateral organizations, such as the World Bank and UN agencies, should conduct independent external reviews of their contributions to the MDGs and identify benchmarks for post-2015 success based on the results. And the United States needs to join the international community in making a solid commitment to long-term, goal-oriented foreign aid.

The MDGs have helped mobilize and guide development efforts by emphasizing outcomes. They have encouraged world leaders to tackle multiple dimensions of poverty at the same time and have provided a standard that advocates on the ground can hold their governments to. Even in countries where politicians might not directly credit the MDGs, the global effort has informed local perspectives and priorities. The goals have improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. They have shown how much can be achieved when ambitious and specific targets are matched with rigorous thinking, serious resources, and a collaborative global spirit.

Looking forward, the next generation of goals should maintain the accessible simplicity that has allowed the MDGs to succeed and also facilitate the creation of better accountability mechanisms both within and across governments. In addition, the new goals need to give low- and middle-income countries a greater voice in shaping the agenda. Most important, momentum matters. Just as progress in individual MDG areas has inspired other campaigns, so work done now, in the final stretch, will affect what happens in the future. The results achieved by 2015 will mark an endpoint, but even more, they will provide a springboard for the next generation of goals. There is no time to lose.

Authors

John McArthur

Publication: Foreign Affairs

Image Source: © Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah / Reuters

A Guide to the Post-2015 Debates for the Millennium Development Goals

John McArthur — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 13:51:00 -0500

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been a remarkable global political success. As targets established in 2000 to cut extreme poverty in its many forms in half by 2015, the MDGs have focused the world’s attention on tackling the integrated challenges of the poorest billion people on the planet – those who live on less than $1.25 a day and lack reliable access to food, safe drinking water, sanitation, or even the most basic education and health care. The MDGs have been fruitful enough in focusing attention that they have prompted a burgeoning global debate on what international goals should come next.

The post-2015 arguments have so many dimensions that any subset of global constituencies focused on resolving its own piece of the puzzle risks spending large amounts of time finding “solutions” that are untenable among players working on other key pieces. Even the jargon is tricky, since labels like “sustainable development goals” that took hold around the 2012 Rio+20 summit are loaded with disparate embedded meanings across a range of key constituencies, with some deeming the term essential while others consider it politically toxic. Meanwhile, in a case study of political semantics, the notion of setting “goals for sustainable development” has broader agreement as a more impartial conceptual starting point, surpassed by the even more neutral term of “post-2015 development agenda.”

To help distill the issues as the post-2015 debate grows, here is a cheat sheet describing what is on the table, who is involved, a typology of perspectives, the rough contours of a roadmap, and the implications for Canada.

The Substance

The post-2015 deliberations include four basic categories of topics, any or all of which might be included in a final intergovernmental agreement. First is the core MDG extreme poverty agenda, which has been most effectively advanced in recent years in areas of health and education. The world has made tremendous gains towards improving living standards and cutting the many forms of extreme poverty in half over the past generation. Many believe the time is now ripe to finish the job and set a goal of “getting to zero” on extreme poverty by 2030.

Concerns over the shortfalls have grown over the past decade as fast-growing emerging economies have struggled to manage their environmental footprints and we have seen an increase in global awareness of the threat of climate change.

Second is the issue of environmental sustainability, for which the MDGs have prompted less success, even though one of the MDGs’ eight headline goals draws some attention to the issue. Concerns over the shortfalls have grown over the past decade as fast-growing emerging economies have struggled to manage their environmental footprints and we have seen an increase in global awareness of the threat of climate change. Neither climate nor so-called “green growth” issues are addressed in the MDG framework, and many believe planetary boundaries can no longer be ignored in any global development strategy, especially as the world’s population is slated to grow by two billion people by mid-century. The politics around climate issues are particularly tricky, since the post-2015 discussions cannot outrun the UN intergovernmental process for climate negotiations, which has a 2015 deadline for a new agreement but faces formidable challenges to reaching a comprehensive global policy solution.

A third category focuses on governance, broadly defined. The term means many things to many people, from transparency to fiscal accountability to human rights to democratization to system building in fragile states. The MDGs did not include governance targets, in order to avoid ideological debates and focus on ends rather than means. But many think the global views have evolved to a point where at least issues like budget transparency can be agreed upon by all countries.

A fourth category focuses on inequality and social inclusion, in line with the growing concern that the spoils of global development are disproportionately benefiting the most privileged – whether the top 10 per cent, one percent, or even 0.1 per cent of any society – while the less privileged are either left behind or directly excluded. Many advocates worry that global goals based on country averages overlook primary concerns of discrimination, whether by gender, ethnicity, or age. Others are focused on jobs and unemployment, especially among youth. Concerns around inequality reflect perhaps the deepest zeitgeist of the post-2015 discussions, even if they remain among the most difficult to tackle through internationally agreed-upon targets. Everyone agrees, for example, that less child mortality is better, but there is ample room for debate on what counts as an optimal level of income inequality, and countries like the U.S. are unlikely to endorse an internationally agreed-upon number as a benchmark any time soon.

Who Is Involved

The MDGs took shape at the turn of the millennium, when concerns were rife over the divisions between the rich and poor countries. Amidst the ongoing transformation of the global economy, today’s world can no longer be neatly geopolitically divided between developed and developing states. Accordingly, there are big debates as to which countries should even be implementing post-2015 goals. There are still three-dozen low-income countries with annual per capita incomes of $1,025 or less. This includes an array of fragile states where governments still struggle to provide even the simplest services and progress is generally stuck. But the majority of the world’s extreme poor now live in relatively fast-growing middle-income economies, which face rapidly changing social and environmental pressures, with enormous consequences for the entire planet. Most of those emerging economies want to tackle domestic challenges, but have little patience for rich-country dictums on governance or the environment that might form roadblocks to shared prosperity. Meanwhile, many of the high-income countries are struggling to balance domestic and global priorities amidst long-term fiscal strains. Countries like the United Kingdom stand out for their courageous ongoing leadership on the MDGs, including the forthcoming achievement this year of the longstanding foreign aid target of 0.7 per cent of national income.

It remains to be seen whether a global intergovernmental framework of goals can foster a consistent yet decentralized system of goals for actors outside of government, too.

At the same time, there is a growing sentiment that global development goals should no longer be the preserve of governments alone. Companies increasingly want to contribute, and want transparent and predictable metrics for holding themselves accountable. Non-governmental organizations similarly want a voice at the table, and seek to ensure that powerfully resourced actors are accountable to citizens of all forms. Meanwhile, some key players like the Gates Foundation play a unique role in catalyzing and bridging innovations across governments, civil society, and scientific communities all at once. It remains to be seen whether a global intergovernmental framework of goals can foster a consistent yet decentralized system of goals for actors outside of government, too.

A Typology of Views

Across the complex range of issues and stakeholders, four distinct types of perspectives seem to be taking shape.

A “conservative” view wants to stay focused on the specific challenges of extreme poverty, tweaking the MDG targets as needed, but warning that broadening the agenda weakens the focus on one of the greatest successes ever to come out of the United Nations.
An “upgrading” view wants an MDG-plus agenda, modestly expanding the existing goals to include one or two other top-tier global priorities, like governance, inequality, or climate change.
A “geostrategic” view wants to focus on the priorities of the rapidly growing large economies like Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia that account for nearly half the world’s population. Such countries face, in varying degrees, the middle-income challenges of managing very modest domestic resources, rather than the low-income challenge of having incredibly scarce resources. Their voices are increasingly heard in venues like the G20. In many respects, these countries’ forthcoming challenges of economic transformation amount to the world’s overarching challenge of sustainability.
A “comprehensive” view sees 2015 as the one big chance to forge an integrated global agreement tackling all countries’ challenges of extreme poverty and social inclusion while operating within planetary boundaries. In this view, the fates of people and planet are too deeply interwoven to be subject to separate agreements.

How Will the Arguments Be Resolved?

It is impossible to predetermine political outcomes on any contemporary global issue. Nonetheless, there are a few key players and checkpoints on the road to 2015. The first is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is responsible for convening the global political negotiations and using his good offices to help distill and shape the agenda among UN member states. He has a talented team helping to guide the process, including Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson and Assistant Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. He has also commissioned a high-level panel co-chaired by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. That panel is scheduled to recommend its priorities later this spring, in time for the General Assembly’s consideration before a major MDG-focused event in September.

Concurrently, the General Assembly has formed its own “expert group” to recommend a path forward on sustainable development goals (however those end up being defined), in line with the agreements of the Rio+20 conference. Meanwhile, the UN Development Programme is actively engaging in country-level consultations in more than 60 countries, alongside the “MY world” online collaboration with NGOs to solicit citizen votes on priorities from around the world. It remains unclear how all of these pieces will fit together, and how they will align with the practicalities of negotiation among global powers. But there is a good chance that 2013 will bring clarity on the substantive priorities to be tackled through post-2015 goals, and that 2014 will then see gradual convergence around specific goals. By September 2015, there needs to be enough convergence for an intergovernmental agreement with teeth. Hopefully, this will include a serious agreement on climate change, either as part of a post-2015 deal or as a parallel UN agreement.

How Does Canada Fit In?

The post-2015 negotiations prompt two key questions for Canada, each of which merits significant public analysis and debate. First, how has the country performed on the MDGs? Canada has supported the MDGs rhetorically, and has made important contributions to global health and, more recently, hunger. But by any quantitative standard, the country has fallen short in matching the MDGs’ core issue of scale. The divergence between Canada’s relative stasis and the U.K.’s leadership path over the past decade is striking in this regard.

Second, what does Canada want to prioritize globally and how does it want to position itself in a post-2015 world? A senior government official recently told me, for example, that the further the post-2015 negotiations delve into climate issues, the less supportive Canada will be. Will the government ramp up its efforts on extreme poverty in order to divert attention from environmental issues? Will it latch onto governance as either a legitimate priority in development or perhaps a bargaining chip with emerging economies? Is there a possibility of changing course on climate and environmental policy if the second Obama administration takes a new approach? Everything is on the table.

Canada’s political leaders have ultimate responsibility to set these policies on behalf of the nation. But their decisions must be the product, rather than simply the driver, of active societal debate. Such deliberations require years to evolve and take shape. Canadian voices need to be heard, and to engage with the broader world. The year 2015 is fast approaching, but there is still time for rich discussion. On that note, let the deliberations begin!

Authors

John McArthur

Publication: OpenCanada.org

Image Source: © Rupak De Chowdhuri / Reuters

A ZEN Approach to Post-2015: Addressing the Range of Perspectives across Asia

Douglas H. Brooks, Kaushal Joshi, John McArthur, Changyong Rhee and Guanghua Wan — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:12:00 -0500

INTRODUCTION

Among the world’s developing regions, Asia has undoubtedly seen the most dramatic overall transformation since 2000. Fifteen years ago, just before the dawn of the new millennium, the region was struck by a profound macroeconomic crisis, plunging several economies into recession and highlighting a sense of fragility in the long-term stability of many countries’ policy strategies. Yet in the intervening period, the region has enjoyed widespread economic growth, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The progress has extended well beyond measures of growth and income poverty. Assessed against the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets, Asia’s success in areas like health, education, and access to drinking water all stand out globally. At the same time, Asia’s progress is far from complete. It still has huge poverty challenges and its environmental challenges are growing rapidly.

Asia’s remarkable development trajectory has many important implications for global partnership strategies moving forward. The MDG targets became the central reference point for development collaboration following their establishment at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. Their success lies partly in their integrated articulation of extreme poverty as a multidimensional agenda spanning issues of income, hunger, education, health, gender equality, and environmental sustainability. It also lies partly in their clear and quantified nature, which has helped to stimulate progress across many issues and geographies where it was lagging. At the same time, the MDGs have been far from a panacea for the world’s evolving sustainable development challenges, spanning economic, social and environmental tensions. Indeed the MDGs have been least effective in promoting progress on the environment, as evidenced by many trends in Asia.

The final MDG deadline will be at the end of 2015, and much work remains to be done before then. Nonetheless, international deliberations are actively underway regarding the vision and goals for a post-2015 global development framework. At a time of significant change in the global economy and in the nature of the world’s sustainable development challenges, a large and growing number of stakeholders are already engaged. The United Nations (UN) system has made significant efforts to consolidate the perspectives of its own staff (e.g., UN 2012) and to consult with stakeholders around the world. The Secretary-General has launched an eminent High-Level Panel of experts to provide recommendations on related issues, and the General Assembly has committed to launch its own expert group. Meanwhile a variety of regional bodies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and individual experts have also presented an array of views regarding recommended priorities for the next generation of goals.

Amidst the emerging debates, there has been significant emphasis on which specific goals should be included in the post-2015 framework. For example, many analysts are focused on which of the MDG goals should be kept, which should be dropped, and what new goals should be added. Such discussions lend themselves to complexity and are inherently zero-sum in their structure. Ultimately, they amount to competition for limited space on a single political agenda amidst a legitimately growing number of influential stakeholder voices around the world, both inside and outside of governments.

This paper takes a different approach. Rather than focusing on the intricacies of which specific goals might be added, kept, or dropped, we focus on the three basic types of goals that need to be addressed in a post-2015 framework. We call this the “ZEN” approach, with each letter of the acronym reflecting a central component, or goal, of sustainable development: achieving “zero” extreme poverty in its many forms (Z), tackling country-specific “Epsilon” socioeconomic challenges beyond extreme poverty (E), and addressing the environmental imperatives that underpin long term development (N).

Building on this ZEN framework, the paper considers global design and implementation issues for E and N goals in particular. It describes different underlying challenges inherent in various types of goals, and suggests an approach to tackling them, anchored in common indicators, voluntary targets, coordinated monitoring and reporting, and peer review. These suggestions are presented with an eye to the diversity of challenges across Asia, including fast growing economies that still face deep poverty alongside growing environmental challenges, in addition to a range of circumstances faced by the many slower growth economies, fragile states, challenged island economies, and landlocked countries. As an overarching caveat, we note that the conceptual and practical ideas in this paper are only intended to inform deliberations on potential directions for post-2015. The paper’s proposals offer broad strokes in direction, and would certainly benefit from improvement and refinement through active discussion and debate.

The paper proceeds in six sections. Following this introduction, the second section provides context by describing Asia’s progress on the MDGs, in addition to the region’s emerging challenges. Section III briefly describes broader lessons from the MDG experience. Section IV begins the heart of the paper’s contributions, introducing the ZEN conceptual approach to post-2015. Section V then outlines some key issues for implementation, with particular emphasis on mechanisms for pursuing voluntary country-level targets that aim above the thresholds of extreme poverty. A final section concludes.

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Authors

Douglas H. Brooks
Kaushal Joshi
John McArthur
Changyong Rhee
Guanghua Wan

Publication: Asian Development Bank

Image Source: © Andrew Biraj / Reuters

“Getting to Zero” on Child Mortality

John McArthur — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 09:32:00 -0500

What child survival goals should be included in a global vision of “getting to zero” on extreme poverty? This question will be increasingly debated as the world maps out a framework to succeed the Millennium Development Goals post-2015. As a first crack at an answer, I suggest a universal target of no more than 30 deaths per 1,000 live births for every community on the planet by 2030.

For context, one of the biggest global breakthroughs of the past decade has been faster progress in reducing child mortality. In statistical jargon, the developing world’s aggregate child mortality rate dropped from 80 per 1,000 live births in 2000 to 57 in 2011, en route to a projected 51 in 2015.

In plain English this means that, as of 2000, more than one out of every 12 children born in the developing world did not live to see their fifth birthday. By 2011, the figure improved to one in 17, and for 2015, it is on track to be one in 20.

But even though every developing region has seen progress quicken since 2000, mortality rates still vary tremendously, as shown in the table below.

In light of ongoing advances in programmes and technology, it makes sense to set an absolute minimum standard for all of humanity: no more than 30 per 1,000 by 2030, and perhaps even 25 per 1,000. For comparison, Algeria and Mongolia are currently at 30. Most rich countries are at around 4 or 5.

If Africa continues to improve at recent rates, its mortality will hit 59 per 1,000 in 2030. If it improves almost as quickly as East Asia did in the 2000s, it could get below 30. With slight acceleration, South Asia could also reach 20 or 25 by 2030, making sure averages don’t mask disparities and no community remains above 30. Technology improvements could accelerate things even more.

Nonetheless, it is important to remember that even a child mortality rate of 30 still tragically implies that more than 3% of babies do not reach their fifth birthday. That single sobering fact should serve as enormous motivation when considering how historic it would be to ensure every part of the world reaches at least that standard within the next 18 years.

Authors

John McArthur

Publication: World Economic Forum Blog

Image Source: © Feisal Omar / Reuters

Rethinking Global Development Goals

John McArthur — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:03:00 -0400

Governments around the world are grappling to find goals that can set a course for our planet’s shared long-term prosperity. They aim to do so before 2015, the expiration date for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that have anchored global antipoverty efforts since 2000. The MDGs—to eradicate poverty, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empowerment, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat killer diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development—have been endorsed by all 193 UN member states, a huge feat considering how difficult international cooperation can be today.

Diplomats are wary as they face launching a post-2015 generation of goals. Many observers felt despair after the UN’s June Rio+20 event produced few concrete outcomes. A more pragmatic reaction would be to consider what system innovations could stretch beyond the walls of government to help achieve new goals.

Let’s start by asking what “global goals” mean today, and more important, for 2030. A generation ago they mainly meant officials coordinating government policies and investments around the world. At the time, rich and poor countries were clearly delineated and multilateral institutions helped broker conversations. Today’s geopolitical map is far more complicated. There has been a realignment of economic influencers and institutions, and dividing lines between developed and developing nations have blurred.

Read the full piece at the Stanford Social Innovation Review's website » (PDF)

Authors

John McArthur

Publication: Stanford Social Innovation Review

Image Source: © Jason Lee / Reuters

Jim Kim’s Deepest World Bank Challenge

John McArthur — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 11:35:00 -0400

In his first major speech this week as World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, stressed a goal of brokering solutions to support a world free of poverty. The World Bank’s success on this front hinges on more than technical debates over organizational strategy and design. Ultimately it depends on tackling the institution’s cultural ambivalence toward global policy goals, and an underlying mindset propagated by professional economists.

The Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015, midway through Dr. Kim’s initial term. Since their establishment as targets in 2000, the MDGs have been the world’s central reference point for fighting extreme poverty. They have helped spur a range of breakthroughs over the past decade, most prominently in global health, where Dr. Kim has long been at the forefront of innovation.

After the United Nations’ recent Rio+20 event, debates are wide open on setting goals for post-2015. Issues of extreme poverty, the environment, social equity and governance are all under consideration. As the world’s leading repository of technical development expertise, the bank’s economist-dominated staff will significantly inform deliberations.

Economists have important skills – I like to think, being one myself – but at the core we are trained in marginal analysis: to optimize based on existing constraints. For development goals, the question often needs to be flipped. Instead of asking “how far can we go with the resources at hand,” a goal-based approach asks: “what resources are needed to achieve the goal at hand?” Indeed health practitioners more instinctively think about goals as first principles, such as “what is needed to save this patient’s life?”

This epistemic divide helps explain why so few economists were prominent in the past decade’s global health breakthroughs, Jeffrey Sachs being the most notable exception. In 2001, most economists were still operating within budget constraints that global health leaders rejected as first premise. World Bank staff were left to optimize amidst financial and political constraints defined by their donor shareholders. The trend extended to other sectors, and a weird dynamic took hold by which many deemed the bank as the foot-dragging technocratic heavyweight in the global MDG effort. Even IMF macroeconomists would privately lament their sibling institution’s slow MDG movements.

To be sure, many World Bank leaders have provided strong leadership for the MDGs, dating back to the presidency of James Wolfensohn. Nicholas Stern and Francois Bourguignon were both profoundly committed as successive chief economists at the bank. But the MDGs never fully permeated the World Bank’s operations. Staff were not against the goals, yet the institutional culture did not compel MDG implementation as a mandate, nor did the board demand bureaucratic adjustments for the goals to be taken seriously at the country level. Last year, I even heard a bank economist say publicly that the MDGs were too ambitious for African communities to aspire to, something I had previously only heard staff say privately.

The World Bank’s MDG ambivalence mirrors a reticence in the broader economics community. While The Lancet, the eminent health journal, has published more than 1,000 articles referencing the MDGs over the last decade, the gold standard American Economic Review tallied only seven, the Quarterly Journal of Economics had four and the Journal of Political Economy had one. The specialty Journal of Development Economics did not even mention the MDGs until a 2007 article, and only in 12 other articles since. A search through roughly 3,700 World Bank policy research papers since September 2000 finds that only 89 mention the MDGs, slightly more than 2 percent.

Fortunately, Dr. Kim knows how to reframe institutional ambitions in the face of strong personalities, as he did with the “3 by 5” initiative to get 3 million people on AIDS treatment by 2005. To cement a goal-based World Bank for post-2015, two practical initiatives can help make inroads. First, there should be an independent evaluation of the bank’s contributions to the MDGs, with public review by July 2013. It should assess where the staff, board, and procedures have both helped and hindered. Second, staff should be tasked to recommend ambitious proposals for new global development goals, with emphasis on how the World Bank can help ensure success. For example, what might it actually look like to “get to zero” on extreme poverty by 2030? How could sustainability metrics be interwoven?

Cultural change is never easy in large public institutions. But as Dr. Kim said in his speech, “Progress is possible for everyone. Nothing is pre-determined.” With transparent self-assessment and a deliberate focus on global goals, the World Bank can translate its vast talent into leadership for many years to come.

Authors

John McArthur

Image Source: Jason Reed / Reuters

From Physical BRICS to Digital CHIIPs

John McArthur — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 14:21:00 -0400

It has become commonplace over the past decade to describe the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and, more recently, South Africa – as a defining force in the global economy. While few can dispute the major shifts away from the advanced economies like the United States and those in Europe, the world’s future economic frontiers might be better captured by the acronym CHIIPs— referring to China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. The world is increasingly defined more by digital chips than physical bricks, and these four countries accounted for more than half the world’s new Internet users since 2008.

The figures are embedded in a recent report by Mary Meeker and Liang Wu of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Meeker and Wu estimate that the global Internet user base grew more than 40 percent since 2008, with 663 million new people bringing the total number of users to 2.3 billion in 2011. The CHIIPs accounted for a remarkable 349 million newbies, with more than 200 million Chinese joining the fold.

Casual observers might think this trend is the result of a one-time catch-up as these countries with 40 percent of the world’s people industrialize and get online. However, Internet penetration hasn’t even surpassed 40 percent of the population in any of these countries, compared to roughly 80 percent in the United States. India still stands at a mere 10 percent penetration and technology there is leap-frogging. In May, its mobile-based Internet traffic surpassed its desktop-based traffic. The explosive transformation of global Internet usage will continue for several years to come.

The digital phenomenon is not limited to Asia. Nigeria had the fifth-fastest reported Internet growth since 2008, adding more than 20 million users. Mexico, ranked sixth, added almost the same amount. If watching Europe’s economy feels like an ever worsening sequel of “Groundhog Day,” the global CHIIPs film is “The Social Network” of rapid change to come.

The mass proliferation of mobile-based Internet carries far-reaching economic and social consequences. This was on vivid display in Shanghai last month when I sat on the jury of an “AppJam”— a meeting of tech-savvy young entrepreneurs who lock themselves in a room for an allotted time to map out new mobile Internet applications. At this particular competition, a handful of local technology companies dangled a blend of feedback, free pizza, and modest prizes to motivate aspiring participants in their quest for breakthrough apps for the Chinese market.

Several teams committed 45 hours over a sleep-deprived weekend in pursuit of a dream to become China’s Mark Zuckerberg. Most groups had a mix of Chinese, European and North America citizens and were fluidly bilingual between English and Mandarin. The average age was mid-20s. Such deeply cross-cultural innovation teams are clearly a growing norm.

The event’s winners tapped into undercurrents ranging from the unique traits of filing Chinese receipts to the deep affections for pets among the country’s growing middle class. I learned during the proceedings that a cute cat has one of the more significant followings on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. As a non-twentysomething, non-Mandarin speaker who barely manages to tweet most days, I felt inspired for the world but worried for my own laggard ways amidst a joint revolution in global business and technology.

Recent history has underscored the precarious nature of geopolitical predictions, but CHIIPs-type change will probably bring at least two key shifts in favor of young people around the world. First, many of the pathways to accumulating money-based power are evolving fast. Today’s young people with coding skills and business smarts have an unprecedented opportunity to accumulate wealth early in life, since apps have the potential to scale so quickly. Indeed, Meeker and Wu estimate that 44 million apps are downloaded every day on iTunes alone.

Second, relative power balances between age groups will likely adjust as the duration of business innovation cycles seems to be shortening and many technology skills of older generations become outdated at an earlier life stage. This will further amplify young people’s share of long-term economic and political voice, even if that power still takes years to master.

While the advanced economies struggle to stem the risks of systemic meltdown, the underlying global economy is transforming. The shifts are geographic, technological and generational. As the world’s Internet infrastructure continues to evolve and take hold, a new breed of entrepreneurs will keep redefining molds. The CHIIPs label suggests a new frame. We need to start anticipating the implications.

Authors

John McArthur

Image Source: Martin Barraud

Canada's Aid Failure is One of Politics and Punditry

John McArthur — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 10:59:00 -0400

Pundits are not policymakers and they should not be held to the same standard of public responsibility. But opinion leaders do need to take responsibility for their role in shaping public debate and, at times, contributing to policy failure. I was reminded of this last week when reading one of Jeffrey Simpson’s Globe and Mail columns, in which he lamented Canadian foreign aid cuts and asserted that the country’s “once-sterling reputation for caring about Africa is over.”

Rewind the clock to June 2005, when Canada had a brief, once-in-a-generation public discussion on its foreign assistance strategy, especially for Africa. It was the eve of the historic Gleneagles G8 Summit, hosted by then-U.K. prime minister Tony Blair. The Martin government was riding a knife edge in deliberating whether to join other advanced economies, such as the U.K. and the rest of Europe, in committing a fair share of the global financing required to tackle global problems such as AIDS, malaria, and food insecurity.

Fair share was defined as a timetable to achieve the international aid target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income by 2015, the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals. After missing multiple natural policy moments to commit to 0.7 over the previous year, the government was in a last-minute scramble finally to decide before Gleneagles. Many Ottawa decision-makers were new to foreign aid issues and eager to be perceived as hard-headed. At the time I was managing the UN Millennium Project and tracked the situation closely.

During the final critical days of deliberations, Simpson wrote an influential column that helped tip the scales when it accused aid advocates of fiscal naivety. “By all means,” he wrote, “let Canada raise its foreign aid to 0.7. … Remember, however, that such a commitment would eat up just about all available federal money for the next decade. … Forget, therefore, more federal money for provinces, daycare, the homeless, tax cuts, postsecondary education, research, aboriginals or anything else. … There wouldn’t be anything left.”

Thus one of Canada’s most trusted voices misleadingly framed 0.7 as a choice between global disease control and Canadian day care. Absent was a discussion of Canada’s responsibilities toward the Millennium Development Goals. Nor was there mention of the cost of hypocrisy, since Martin had already endorsed 0.7 as finance minister at a landmark 2002 UN conference and his successor minister Ralph Goodale had endorsed the target in March 2005 as a member of the Blair-led Commission for Africa.

Days later, at the G8 summit, Canada said a final no to 0.7. The faux hard-headedness struck a two-fold blow to the country’s international political capital. First, many in the global policy community had believed Martin could be trusted to provide leadership on this issue and felt let down when he did not. Second, Canada is generally considered the “home of 0.7” since the target first took hold globally following an international commission chaired by Lester Pearson in 1969. It is extra costly when a national progenitor is seen as failing to follow through.

In fairness, Simpson had changed tune by a December 2005 column, where he probed, “When the world asked for commitments to deliver 0.7 per cent of GDP for foreign aid, where was Canada?” In March 2010 he later bemoaned Canada’s global aid laggard status as part of the country’s ability to tackle its problems partly on the back of the world’s poor. But where was that Jeffrey Simpson in early 2005?

Fast-forward to 2012 and the U.K. continues to lead by example on 0.7, despite a much worse fiscal situation than Canada’s. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron realizes that 0.7 is not just a good investment in humanity, it is also good politics. The UN Secretary General recently announced a high-level panel to propose global development goals and strategy for a post-2015 world. Cameron is one of three co-chairs, along with the Nobel laureate President of Liberia and the President of Indonesia. The U.K. has earned its oar in the water.

Canada’s politicians should be held responsible for the country’s multi-partisan failure to lead on international development, but ultimately they follow the evolution of public discussions much more than they create them. At a deeper level, Canada has suffered a failure of public deliberation. This can only be solved through active long-term leadership from public voices of all types. Leaders from media, academia, and the private sector need to step up alongside the traditional voices of non-governmental organizations.

It typically takes years for public discourses to take shape around specific issues and serious facts. They need to advance in step with technical debates. What, for example, should Canada’s role be in protecting the remarkable achievements of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria? How should Canada engage on international efforts for girls’ secondary education, or for smallholder farm productivity? How can Canadian businesses and researchers best contribute to post-2015 global development goals if the country’s climate policy is out of sync with global norms?

It will likely be some time before Canada is ready for another high-profile discussion of major aid increases. That does not diminish the importance of proactive and rigorous debate on underlying global issues in the meantime. To avoid long-term echoes of “where was Canada when the world came calling?” opinion leaders should take more responsibility for tackling the substance today.

Authors

John McArthur

Publication: The Ottawa Citizen

Image Source: Chris Wattie / Reuters

Asia Is Crucial to Ending Poverty

John McArthur — Mon, 28 May 2012 10:22:00 -0400

Amid the economic distress emanating from the United States and Europe, no statistic better captures the broader dynamics of the world economy than the recent World Bank announcement that the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to cut extreme poverty by half was met globally in 2010. This was fully five years before the 2015 deadline.

The United Nations also recently declared that the MDG governing access to drinking water has already been achieved. While many of the world's most prosperous nations are clearly struggling, many of the world's formerly struggling nations are clearly prospering. Asia has played the driving role in catapulting humanity to these overall anti-poverty successes, but the latest figures show poverty on the decline in every region, including sub-Saharan Africa.

Access to education has been improving dramatically too, as have metrics of health and child survival, even if faster progress is still needed to fully meet the corresponding goals by 2015. The MDGs have played a crucial role in advancing many of these global anti-poverty breakthroughs since they were established as targets in 2000. They have shown a remarkably robust political resonance despite an increasingly strained climate for international cooperation. And they have motivated countless people across government, business, academia and civil society to augment their efforts, spawn new innovations and forge creative new partnerships.

But the global landscape has changed dramatically over the past decade and the goals mark only a midpoint in the challenge of extreme poverty. It is time to start thinking about what to do after 2015. This topic will be at the top of the global policy agenda when the UN convenes its Rio+20 conference next month in Brazil. The event aims to launch a new global vision for sustainability, one that accounts for the emerging environmental, economic and social challenges taking shape around the world.

To that end, a proposal has been floated for new "sustainable development goals" to follow and build on the success of the MDGs. It will be tricky to turn this into tangible outcomes. Doing so will require an appreciation of the factors that have made the MDGs a success, including their deadline-driven focus, simplicity, measurability, ambition and emphasis on partnership.

Some colleagues and I, meeting under the auspices of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Benchmarking Progress, have recently written a paper on related issues. We recommend new goals be anchored in an overarching vision of "getting to zero" on extreme poverty everywhere by 2030.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently announced a high-level panel to tackle these questions over the coming year. He named three co-chairmen who will bring an important cross-section of perspectives: Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono leads a middle-income country facing some of the world's most complex interplays of economic, environmental and social pressures; Liberian President and Nobel laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first female head of state, is leading a low-income country's efforts to escape poverty and surmount the legacy of a horrific civil war; Prime Minister David Cameron leads a deficit-strained United Kingdom that has long provided the most prominent MDG leadership among rich economies.

In setting the post-2015 global agenda, Asian voices will have large and growing influence. One reason is realpolitik. A greater share of global income means a greater share of geopolitical voice. A second reason is soft power. When a country makes major progress it provides the influence of inspiration to others. A third factor is more subtle. Many of the fast growing Asian economies are straddling a temporary fence of both receiving and giving international support. They still have significant populations in poverty but also provide ever more skills and resources to promote progress in other countries. They are rejecting old "us" versus "them" paradigms of global development policy, replacing it with a more legitimately inclusive "we".

Any new framework of goals must also recognise that the world increasingly does not wait on governments. We need goals for everyone who wants them. Why not encourage scientific communities, industry sectors and non-government organisations around the world to set their own respective targets in alignment with an overarching vision to sustainably end extreme poverty? Each can have their own piece of the puzzle.

A generation ago, more than two out of five people in the developing world lived on less than US$1.25 (38 baht) a day. Today the number is down to one in five, with Asia leading the way. Let's have everyone help find a way to get it to zero everywhere by 2030.

Authors

John McArthur

Publication: Bangkok Post

Goals for Getting to Zero on Extreme Poverty

John McArthur — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:07:00 -0400

Societies around the globe are confronting a daily sense of fragility as economic, environmental and social forces combine to produce surprise after surprise after surprise. There is a common fear that, even in cases of rapid advance, the gains might prove illusory or unsustainable.

But the upside of uncertainty is that good news often comes where its least expected. Many feel this way when they read the most recent World Bank estimates showing dramatic global declines in extreme poverty, measured by those living under US $1.25 (Bt39) a day. East Asia has led the way with the fastest progress by far, but every region has seen its figures drop since 2005. It's conceivable that the numbers could approach zero everywhere by 2030.

These issues will be at the policy forefront next month when the UN's "Rio+20" summit convenes to discuss global sustainability.

To be sure, Asian voices will be ever more pivotal in steering the world's course. At the top of the agenda stands a proposal for new "Sustainable Development Goals", or SDGs.

These would build on the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have become the central reference point for global anti-poverty efforts since they were established in 2000. No less a light than Bill Gates has called the MDGs "the best idea for focusing the world on fighting global poverty that [he has] ever seen".

Setting strong new goals requires an understanding of both how the world has done on the MDGs and how the MDGs have done as goals. Some colleagues and I have recently written a paper on the latter topic, called "Getting to Zero: Finishing the Job the MDGs Started". We were convened through the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Benchmarking Progress, which I've had the privilege to chair. Our paper outlines some key MDG successes and shortcomings and recommends a broad vision for goals to end extreme poverty in its many forms by 2030. We stress the need to ensure that efforts to improve on the MDGs don't overlook the simplicity and quantification that has underpinned their momentum.

We also flag the need to keep pushing ambitions higher across constituencies without overstepping boundaries for global consensus. Leaders from business, science, non-profits and government can all set goals together. It will be a tricky balancing act.

But if a global conversation among key voices starts today, we can surely map out a shared path for sustainably "getting to zero" on extreme poverty within a generation.

Authors

John McArthur

Publication: The Nation

Image Source: Zohra Bensemra / Reuters

Sustainable Development for Fighting Poverty

John McArthur and Mark Malloch-Brown — Sun, 13 May 2012 13:20:00 -0400

The Challenge

Over the past generation, the world has achieved remarkable success in reducing the number of people living on less than US $1.25 per day. According to recent World Bank estimates, the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for halving extreme poverty was reached globally by 2010. In 1990, 43% of the developing world lived in extreme poverty. Today, the figure has dropped to roughly 21%.

Nonetheless, more than 1 billion people still live on less than US $1.25 per day, so there is still a major challenge in sustainably tackling the “second half” of extreme poverty. We recommend a vision of “getting to zero” by 2030, as recently outlined by Aryeetey et al. (2012). The task remains especially important among the fast-growing populations of South Asia, where more than one in three people still live in extreme poverty, and in sub-Saharan Africa, where the ratio is nearly one in two.

But the coming generation must also raise its sights beyond finishing the job on extreme poverty. Today, roughly 43% of the developing world lives under the poverty line of US $2/day, i.e. the same proportion that lived below US $1.25 in 1990. The updated global task through to 2030 is therefore double-barrelled: first, to eliminate extreme poverty and, second, to cut US $2/day poverty by at least half.

The MDGs have formed the central reference point for global development efforts since they were established as international targets in 2000. A new generation of development goals will soon be needed. Like the MDGs, they will need to address much more than boosting incomes. A broad framework of Getting to Zero entails ending chronic hunger, ensuring universal access to secondary education, ensuring universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation, reducing child and maternal deaths to current upper middle-income country levels, and tackling key environmental priorities that will underpin development success. Achieving this suite of goals will in turn reinforce further progress in economic growth.

The pursuit of new goals will need to surmount a crucial tension. On one side stands the need for simplicity and consistency. Lengthening the list of goals or adding a perceived “grab bag” of targets is likely to diminish a framework’s political traction for implementation. On the other side stands the need for adaptation to new realities. The entire world is developing a shared sense of a sustainability imperative alongside the risks of inequality. A large (and growing) share of the extreme poor is now located in middle-income countries and fragile states. Issues like energy, climate change, food prices and population growth will interact to produce new and unpredictable challenges.

An Initiative for Action

Amid the complex and multi-layered discussions on the need for “sustainable development goals” to guide a post-2015 global agenda, we recommend that Rio+20 establishes guiding principles to ensure goals for Getting to Zero are consolidated as at least one primary component of any overarching framework through to 2030. And while governments surely maintain primary responsibility to address the needs of their people, the successful implementation of any such framework will require broad inputs from – and perhaps corresponding targets for – non-governmental stakeholders, including civil society, the private sector and academia.

What to Do

At a more practical and immediate level, we underscore two categories of innovations that can be launched more immediately to support poverty reduction over the coming five to 10 years. Each will require a coalition of entrepreneurs spanning both public and private sectors.

A “Missing Rural Middle” Guarantee Fund for Africa: Much of sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty is constrained by low productivity subsistence agriculture and the lack of an African Green Revolution. Throughout the region, smallholder farmers have almost no access to market-based credit that is adequate in scale, risk-adjusted to account for Africa’s unique climate and pest risks, and structured over extended maturities to allow for season-to-season experimentation as farmers introduce new crops. Recognizing the very limited asset base available for collateral, farmers also need to pool efforts in order to access inputs and market connections at manageable cost. This implies private cooperatives or farmers’ associations.

A financing vehicle is therefore needed to provide these farmer groups with access to “patient capital” loans of perhaps US$ 25,000-US$ 100,000 at a time. The mechanism should launch in the context of a broader ecosystem of business support and agricultural extension services that help farmers identify market opportunities, develop business plans, introduce new farming techniques and implement marketing programmes. The financing facility would focus on the risk-adjustment component of private capital. To reach 25 million smallholders over five years (roughly one-quarter of the total), annual public financing on the order of US $5 billion would be required to backstop US $25 billion of annual private lending. Institutionally, the vehicle could be framed as the African smallholder equivalent of the International Finance Corporation.

Universal Access to Bank Accounts and Smart Cards: More than two-thirds of adults in the developing world are estimated to be without a bank account. And the poorest-of-the-poor typically lack any means to claim or assert access to public services. This is increasingly anachronistic in a world that is fast approaching universal access to cheap broadband mobile telephony.

Following the early regulatory and entrepreneurial lessons of mobile banking in countries like Kenya, there is no reason why governments and financial institutions cannot partner with technology providers to establish programmes by which every adult in the world has access to a low-cost savings account, a major enabler for escaping from poverty. Depending on the evolution of cost curves, these accounts could be accessed either through their mobile phone or smart phone, or through a “smart card” that can interact with someone else’s phone.

The same system of smart cards could serve as an interface for accessing government services and programmes, ranging from emergency health services to farmer input vouchers to conditional cash transfers. Nearly 5 billion new mobile phone accounts were added between 2000 and 2010. At least 1 billion savings accounts and smart cards should be issued by 2020.

Authors

John McArthur
Mark Malloch-Brown

Publication: World Economic Forum

Image Source: Navesh Chitrakar / Reuters

Getting to Zero: Finishing the Job the MDGs Started

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:00:00 -0400

Introduction

The coming three years through 2015 will amount to a crossroads on the path of long-term global cooperation. The challenges will stretch far beyond the unpredictable but urgent daily macroeconomic problems emanating from the advanced economies. They will speak to the principal needs of humanity, affecting billions of the least advantaged people on the planet. Foremost among the challenges stands the fight to end extreme poverty in its many forms. Underpinning this lies the imperative for environmental sustainability. These problems can only be solved through proactive efforts – spanning countries, organizations and citizens.

Ending extreme poverty is not just a matter of charity. Broad-based economic growth in the poorest parts of the world will support the expansion of global markets in all parts of the world. Investments in productive workforces, sustainable food systems and the environment will not only accelerate growth; they will also reduce the risks of costly economic disruptions and social instability.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, listed for reference in Appendix 1) have been the central reference point for global development efforts since they were established as international targets in 2000. As the first global policy vision based on mutual accountability between developing and developed countries, they set a compelling agenda to cut many forms of extreme poverty in half by 2015. Over time, the Goals have gained traction far beyond the walls of government. Bill Gates has called them “the best idea for focusing the world on fighting global poverty that [he has] ever seen.” Nonetheless, the MDGs have weaknesses to learn from, too. Moreover, they will expire in 2015, and they only mark a midway point.

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Publication: World Economic Forum