The InterDependent

When 2015 rolls around barely five years from now and countries tote up their successes and failures at meeting the Millennium Development goals, there will be no final flag at the finish line. For countries that have done well, the challenge is to maintain gains or build on them. For those that have done poorly, some introspection is due and more work planned.

The MDGs track trends and are not ends in themselves, says Stefano Pettinato, who monitors the goals in Latin America and the Caribbean for the UN Development Program from his base in Panama and has learned what leads to success. What matters more than figures on the board at the finish line will be how nations have built or strengthened the institutions that turn trends into lasting elements of daily life that can survive political and economic upheavals. Otherwise, gains can disappear in short order.

The Latin America-Caribbean region has mostly done well by MDG standards, far better than large parts of Africa or the South Asian region. Only Southeast Asia has done better as a region, with strong human development before the goals were agreed on by UN member nations in 2000.

In Thailand – an example that reflects regional trends or feasible aspirations -- literacy is virtually universal, and 100 percent of girls and boys are enrolled in primary education. Fertility rates are low, and population growth has slowed. Abject poverty remains a concern only in rural pockets.

Even in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, with the largest number of the world’s poor, some countries show that solid progress is possible with good government policies, despite poverty, AIDS and, in places, civil war.

Botswana, in the heart of southern Africa, has moved from a least-developed nation to an upper-middle-income country in two decades, held back only by an HIV-AIDS epidemic. In South Asia, Sri Lanka has remained a model of development through years of civil war and natural disasters, albeit with lingering poverty and a tarnished democratic image. Sri Lanka achieved parity in education for boys and girls long ago and is now focusing on how to give its educated women more economic and political power.

Latin America’s Accomplishments
In Latin America, Peru recently released a progress report on meeting the MDGs, and it appears on the verge of success in halving the number of people living on $1 a day or less by 2015, one target of Goal 1. In absolute numbers, however, the country still has a far to go toward total eradication of poverty and hunger. But with an eye toward the future, a committee in Peru’s national legislature has been running a campaign called No Excuses 2015 and has mandated that national budgets include enough resources for meeting and sustaining the MDGs.

Peru’s approach illustrates the how-to advice of Pettinato, the UN Development Program specialist on Latin America, which has been battered by a food-price crisis and the backlash of the global economic slump. Pettinato hastens to point out that while progress has been good, problem areas remain.

“The goal where the region is lagging behind the most is one on improving maternal health,” [Goal 5] he said in an interview from Uruguay, “and along with that, combating HIV-AIDS, malaria and other diseases.” [Goal 6] He also said that protection of biodiversity and forest cover, Goal 7, need attention.

Nevertheless, he noted that a pattern of achieving success toward the MDGs in this region and elsewhere is emerging. “I can think of five things that have been quite important that you tend to see in the successful countries,” Pettinato said.

“First of all, it’s sticking to policies that work, and by sticking to policies I mean making them survive political cycles, with laws that make them become a reality in the long term,” he said. “That is key. We see some social protection programs that have been there for many years and have been enormously successful.” He cited Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, where cash transfers, like welfare, to poor families have been “very, very successful, particularly programs that have been politically sustainable.”

The second characteristic of successful nations, he said, is containing inequalities. “Not only income equality, but equalities of many sorts – of opportunities, of access to basic services such as education, health. There is no country today that I am aware of that doesn’t mention inequality as a plague.”

Third, some of the same countries in the Latin American region that have put substantial money into social programs have also established funds as insurance against future crises, “when you need certain social safety nets … and the government has the least money coming in from taxes and so forth,” he said. “In Chile, some of the copper royalties and taxes levied on that were able to fend off some of the fiscal shortages they [recently] started facing.”

“Fourth, countries were able to understand -- consciously or not with an MDG focus – that you really need to address many things at the same time,” he said. “This is really the whole idea behind the MDGs, that this is a package.” The synergies you create by making an advance in one goal energize other goals, he said.

And finally, Pettinato said, it is important to include citizens who are the recipients of policies at every stage. That means “how many were included or consulted or invited at the table when policies were designed and implemented and evaluated, especially at the local level.”

From the vantage of Americans and others in rich nations, scant attention has been paid to the MDGs because they seem to be just another UN plan of little relevance. But as 2015 approaches, evidence from the developing world is showing that with the goals established as landmarks, more governments and nongovernmental organizations are using them to measure their own national accomplishments or failures in concrete terms and, more important, to start taking charge of their own long-term development priorities.

In the eyes of the world and their own people, politicians know they can’t really argue, given the specific targets in the MDGs, that they don’t know what needs to be done.
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Barbara Crossette is the United Nations correspondent for The Nation and a former New York Times UN bureau chief.