by Kofi Annan
Between this universal simplicity and the commitment to a quantifiable set of targets, the member states thus bound themselves within the shackles of an incredibly powerful global idea. Many of them did so unwittingly, I suspect, not realizing the strength of what they had brought to life and expecting it to suffer the same quick death that had overtaken so many other UN declarations. If so, they were to be surprised by what was to come. The MDGs soon became the overarching framework for the entire international development agenda. A decade later, at the September 2010 UN summit, the MDGs would still be at the pinnacle of global affairs, with every development organization dedicated to them, every government engaged, and countless other partners and businesses geared toward their delivery in every part of the planet.
To anyone who reflects back on the agreement, there is no denying its significance. With all the partners that had morally and formally bought into the project alongside the member states, with the common interest of so many otherwise diverse communities around the world, this was more than just a breakthrough UN declaration: it bore the hallmarks of a global social movement.
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How do you respond to those who say the poor will always be with us?” I asked. I had turned the conversation suddenly. It was July 2, 2005, and I was calling the head of the Anglican Church, the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, to link up before the looming Gleneagles G8 summit. But my real motivation was to ask for spiritual guidance. Once again I had been presented with the view that the campaign to make poverty history was impossible—even ordained by the Bible to fail. The key quotation was in Deuteronomy 15:11: “There will always be poor people in the land.”
“To some extent this is based in thinking that the poor are victims of human sin: that there will always be poor people, because there will always be sinners,” he replied.
“We shouldn’t be complacent,” I responded, trying to find a way out of an excuse for inaction.
The archbishop stressed his agreement: “The idea of shared accountability and social responsibility is explained in the Old Testament, and can be applied to the issue of helping the poor. Deuteronomy 15:4: ‘There should be no poor person among you.’ This is why Deuteronomy 15:11 should be interpreted as instruction that the poor are part of society and should not be ignored, not that we cannot strive to end their plight.” I thanked him for this piece of armory that I had never imagined I would need.
The MDGs—putting people irrevocably at the center of development—created an unprecedented enthusiasm, momentum, and collaboration on a worldwide scale. But it did not end our struggle with the old problems of international development, some even as ancient as interpretations of the Bible. It was a reminder that in international development there is and will always remain the danger of the world’s slipping back into the unenlightened and narrow-minded views of the past.
Following the Millennium Summit, we sensed the risk that the pledge might fall away if we did not sustain the momentum. Our first step was to firm up the agreement and to formalize its aims. Set against the targets of “We the Peoples” and the eight subsequent MDGs were eighteen subsidiary targets and attached to them were forty-eight further individual metrics for assessing progress toward the goals. I presented these to the member states, telling them that these would form a public “scorecard” for each country over the coming years. To give this further bite, I then invited the heads of state and government to a world summit to be held in 2005, where a global-assessment exercise would be conducted under the world’s spotlight on each country’s progress toward the MDGs.
But we also needed a strategy for achieving the goals, which the declaration had not provided. This required a team with the intellectual and analytical prowess to chart such a course. In February 2002, I asked Jeff Sachs to lead this endeavor, which became known as the Millennium Project. Sachs’s unusual intellect and deep commitment to the cause of poverty eradication made him an ideal addition to my senior staff. It was a complex research exercise, and Sachs pulled together 250 eminent participants across the project’s ten task forces, engaging all of the UN system and representatives of all the major UN agencies, while also linking up with on-the-ground efforts across developing countries.
What the Millennium Project demonstrated was that the MDGs were attainable. We just needed the right level of commitment, effort, and, most of all, external assistance. While we had targets and a growing set of plans to make the MDGs a reality, crucial to any success was the ingredient captured in the eighth goal: a global partnership.
This partnership is vital because of the worst feature of extreme poverty: alone, the poor are in too dire a position to help themselves. As Jeff Sachs has explained on many occasions, the basic requirement for ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest to step onto the ladder of development, which the millions upon millions of the poorest in the world are unable to do alone because of the “poverty trap.” This is when communities become caught in a vicious cycle that denies them the minimum level and forms of capital necessary to initiate a process of development.
For any hope of achieving some form of economic development, communities need a combination of several different types of capital, including human, physical, and natural capital. The essential components of these take many forms: healthy individuals free from malnutrition with the skills to productively engage in the economy; asserting women’s rights to determine their own reproductive destiny; facilities for commercial activity, such as transport for agriculture or facilities and machinery for other sectors; infrastructure, including transport networks, power supplies, and sanitation and communication systems; healthy soils and ecosystems that sustain human communities; public institutional capacity, in the form of commercial law, judicial and security services, underpinning peaceful societies of commerce and labor; and finally, knowledge, in the form of scientific expertise and skills required to raise productivity and boost other areas of capital. There is also an important role for social capital—the collective value of cohesive community relationships—which, through its networks of trust, enables the sharing of resources between individuals, boosting the power of other forms of capital and also enabling households to survive in times of deepest hardship.
For a community to enjoy any prospects for economic development there has to be a cycle of accumulation of such forms of capital. This requires that the income of each household be of a sufficient size to leave enough left over for both household savings and contributions to the public budget through taxation. These then enable investment in human, physical, and natural capital that in turn sustain business and economic development. What then emerges is a virtuous cycle of capital accumulation, allowing economic growth, in turn strengthening opportunities for increases in household income, and so on.
But among households in communities caught in the poverty trap, what income they have is spent entirely on keeping the household’s members alive. This means there is no money available for taxes or savings. Hence, with population growth, the depreciation in the value of assets continues, which leads to an ever-reducing stock of capital in the form of resources and services available in the community. This further reduces opportunities for increases in income for individual households, usually leading to even further decreases in income. Add the impact of diseases, which such households are too poor to protect themselves against or treat, and productivity drops even more dramatically, with the income and capital available deteriorating still further.
The result is negative economic growth and an ever-decreasing level of capital per person. This is the situation for millions of communities around the world, and without help from outside, the situation continues to worsen. The only solution is through the managed use of an external injection of capital into that community to transform the cycle of the poverty trap into one of capital accumulation; significant development assistance from wealthy countries is essential for financin
g this process.
At the heart of the Millennium Development Goals was an understanding, which today is growing but remains incomplete, of the unique contribution that the empowerment of women can make to achieve the wider aims of poverty reduction, sustainable development, education, good governance, and human rights for all. During my travels to some of the most vulnerable communities in the world—from Afghanistan to India to Africa—I often made it a priority to seek out the schools for girls, microfinance projects geared towards women’s employment, and the homes and hospitals that cared for the women victims of HIV/AIDS. I saw the boundless curiosity and eagerness for learning in the eyes of the young girls, the entrepreneurial spirit and sense of responsibility among those engaged in new businesses, and the cruel existence of women carrying a disease that their society often would not even acknowledge. I made it a point to meet with women activists and NGO leaders, ministers and teachers—not just to offer my encouragement and support but also to send a message to their own national leaders that to the United Nations, women would never be invisible.
Of course we also knew that there was no easy path to achieving the empowerment of women—or even basic equality. Gender disparities in education, for example, often reflect social attitudes and cultural practices that will take time and sustained effort to overcome. Early marriage is a stark example. For the poorest households in many countries, marrying off daughters at a young age to secure a bride price is often a practice driven by economic need. Add to that the concern in some societies that the benefits of any investment in a daughter’s education will be transferred to her future husband’s family. The disincentive for girls’ schooling is, tragically, all too common. In countries such as Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, Bangladesh, India, and Sierra Leone, between one-quarter and one-third of girls marry by the age of fifteen—effectively marking the end of their education and the beginning of a life without equality of opportunity.
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After the Millennium Declaration, international financing for the MDGs was the big missing piece. I decided that we needed to bring together the world’s leading thinkers and politicians on the subject, to devise a political strategy for the way forward in a process that would conclude with a special summit of finance ministers and heads of state and government. In November 2000, I asked Ernesto Zedillo, the president of Mexico, to chair this panel.
The subsequent International Conference on Financing for Development was held in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002. This produced the Monterrey Consensus, in which it was formally agreed by over fifty attending heads of state and two hundred finance, foreign, and international development ministers that globalization and privatization alone could not be expected to help the poorest countries, as they lacked the infrastructure and human capital to attract such investment. External government-issued aid, therefore, had an essential role to play in international development, as well as foreign investment and trade. To back this up they issued an enormously important statement, urging “all developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts toward the goal of 0.7 percent of gross domestic product as official development assistance.”
This commitment to 0.7 percent of GDP was a breakthrough because it represented, for the first time, a decisive financial agreement among developed countries to commit the necessary resources to poverty eradication. Before Monterrey, aid from developed countries had been in decline for many years. In 2002, it stood at barely 0.2 percent of their shared GDP. Monterrey saw the reversal of this trend for the first time since the Cold War. It also brought an unexpected pledge from U.S. president George W. Bush, who decided to join the conference at the last minute. He promised $10 billion from the United States over three years to go into the Millennium Challenge Account, a project designed to increase assistance to countries that had demonstrated their ability to use external funding successfully. Granted, even this new level of commitment did not bring the United States to even 0.2 percent of GDP in overseas development assistance. The United States was still one of the lowest contributors to development in terms of its capacity to pay. Nevertheless, this new move was hugely encouraging. We were nowhere near where we needed to be, but at least we now seemed to be facing in the right direction.
But this did not last long. A few months prior to the Monterrey conference, New York and Washington DC had been struck by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a result, preparations to invade Iraq loomed large soon after Monterrey, and world attention fled to that issue, doing enormous diplomatic damage to our attempts to bring about a common and united international focusing of efforts and resources on poverty. While those in the Bush administration were preparing for a military reckoning with Iraq, they were increasingly turning their heads from international development and dividing up the international community as they went.
One of the cruelly ironic features of this change was the fact that international development is a crucial part of the long-term fight against terrorism. While there are no statistical correlations between levels of poverty and the incidence of terrorist attacks in particular countries, failed development and poverty creates inequalities that underpin many of the grievances that drive terrorism. Furthermore, a lack of development undermines a country’s ability to sustain effective domestic security forces. It is partnerships with these local forces that in the last ten years have proved the most effective means in tackling al Qaeda globally. International development is a vital security interest for nations of the rich world with any concerns about terrorism.
But in a world consumed with the specter of terrorism, this was poorly understood. Following the invasion of Iraq, members of the Bush administration—though not Bush himself—even turned against the concept of the MDGs. They started refusing to refer to the MDGs in speeches on development and began opposing their mention in UN and OECD documents. Concerned by the commitment required of rich countries by the MDGs there was even a moment when U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton attempted to have any mention of the MDGs removed from the draft declaration of the 2005 UN summit, despite it being an event concerned with examining progress toward the goals. Entirely isolated in this endeavor, Bolton was not able to succeed, but this attempt to savage the MDGs at a summit designed to advance them did not benefit the United States’ standing in the world.
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It is in this erratic manner that the fight against poverty has lurched on ever since. The 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, hosted by Tony Blair and underpinned by the staunch support of the British finance minister Gordon Brown, was another highlight that later compromised itself. Gleneagles saw a new set of groundbreaking promises, including a pledge to double aid to Africa by 2010. But the G8 has since reneged on this promise.
The vast array of supporters, organizations, activists, and local leaders engaged in development need the financial support and opportunities that only the rich world can provide to multiply the striking results such targeted aid has produced. To mention just two very isolated examples of the impact of targeted aid:
By 2000, malaria was killing over twenty-nine thousand people a year in Ethiopia. In 2005, as part of its campaign to meet the MDGs, the government introduced a program to deliver two mosquito nets to every family at risk, alongside a reduction in the cost of malarial drugs and treatment. This was possible only with donor support, and within three years, deaths from malaria were cut in half. In Rwanda in 2003, access to health care stood at just 7 percent of the population. But a health insurance scheme was brought into place, with the small fee subsidized by foreign aid for those who could not afford it. By 2009, this simple scheme saw access to health care rise to 85 percent.
It is these kinds of projects, replicated across the range of issues and around the world, that could create the sustained, worldwide leap forward in the campaign to end poverty that the MDGs demand. And their enormous and tangible impact on the lives of those affected is impossible without donor fundi
ng. But the rich world keeps faltering and has repeatedly failed to fall in decisively behind these activities. While the overall decline in contributions has been reversed since 2000, the developed world has not come anywhere near to meeting its collective promise to dedicate just 0.7 percent of GDP to overseas development assistance—the minimum financial contribution required for any hope of ending extreme poverty.
It is vital, however, also to emphasize that the success of external support is utterly predicated on leadership and the institutional reform efforts of recipient countries. It is not only corruption that can make aid money ineffective or wasteful. It is weak policies, poor leadership, and unaccountable institutions that produce dire results for the lives of the poor as well. In Pakistan, for example, the rate of teacher absenteeism has been 19 percent, and in some places in the world it is as high as 25 percent or more. In Bangladesh, absenteeism rates for doctors in primary health care centers have been reported at 74 percent. As emphasized in a report by the World Bank, absenteeism rates of such severity are not a matter of money—they are an institutional problem that must be resolved through reform and institutional change, which depends upon local leadership and true on-the-ground partners for social progress.
Many developing countries have proven reluctant to undertake necessary reforms to resolve these kinds of institutional problems because such policies can be divisive and politically contentious. (Teachers unions and medical unions can often be powerful players in local politics.) As a 2011 report evaluating success in achieving the MDGs concluded, those countries that are on track for meeting the MDGs are there not because they received the largest amount of aid but because, most of all, they have made the greatest efforts in economic reforms, including in innovations in service delivery.
