What Next for the Millennium Development Goals?

Abstract

It is just about time for yet another round of internationaldevelopment goals. The Millennium Development Goals(MDGs) – the eight goals, 20 targets and 60+ indicatorsthat came out of the United Nations in 2000 – are comingto the end of their natural life. Although the official enddate is not until 2015, if your country is not close to reach-ing the MDGs now, there is simply not much time tocatch up. (Helpfully, the UN’s MDG Monitor websitecounts down to 2015 by the second.)As 2015 ticks ever closer, international bureaucrats (andI use that term affectionately since I have been one) aredeciding how to cook up the nextround of goals. We can be assuredthat there will be another round ofMDG-like goals sometime fairly soonbecause this has been the consistentpattern for much of the last century.My colleague Michael Clemens docu-ments how global universal primaryeducation has been repeatedly prom-ised by grand international summitssince at least 1934, even if their actual impact has beenquestionable (Clemens, 2004).So what should MDGs redux look like if we want themto be constructive and not merely more of the same? Agood place to start is to consider the pluses and minuses ofthe current set. On the positive side, the MDGs have beenhugely successful at fundraising. The MDGs evolved outof a set of goals created at the OECD in the mid-1990s asa direct attempt to try to reverse the steep cuts in foreignaid after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Total aidplummeted by more than 20 per cent between 1992 and1997, prompting waves of panic within the aid community.At the time of the September 2000 UN Summit when theMDGs were adopted unanimously by the largest-ever gath-ering of heads of state, total aid was around $60 billion peryear. By 2005 the level had doubled to around $120 billionand it has hovered around this level ever since. Coinciden-tally, a series of ‘MDG costing studies’ suggested that justsuch a doubling was necessary for those goals to beachieved (Devarajan et al., 2002; Zedillo, 2001). A linkbetween the MDGs and this spike in aid seems highlyplausible. Nearly all donor countries justified their increaseson the basis of, if not directly meeting the MDGs, helpingto reach MDG-like goals, such as fighting poverty, educat-ing children or stemming the HIV⁄AIDS pandemic.Another useful contribution of the MDGs has been tofocus the development community – and the taxpayingpublic – on outcomes, if somewhat belatedly. Although itseems obvious today to track progress on intended targets,common practice in the past was simply to calculate inputs:how much money was spent, how many books werebought, etc., rather than on the hoped-for changes incountries, such as healthier and more educated people.Finding out what is actually happening on the ground notonly helps to establish if money andeffort are reaching their intendedobjectives, but also helps to makecritical efficiency decisions. If we aimfor educated children, a logical firststep is at least to know how manykids are enrolled in school. It alsoprovides a baseline for deeper evalua-tion that can help make policy deci-sions, such as: is it better to useadditional marginal dollars to build schools or pay teachershigher salaries or fight diseases that too often keep kidsout of school? In fact, the approach of finding out how weare actually doing is obvious now in part because of theMDGs. Tracking and reporting have become mainstream –and it is not too much of a stretch to give the goals part ofthe credit.Yet, the MDGs also have some serious weaknesses.While the goals were initially intended as global aspira-tions, they quickly became actual targets for countries.Some of this was (likely well-intentioned if lazy) misuse ofthe goals as a replacement for national targets. If Goal Fivesays that the maternal mortality ratio should be reduced bythree-quarters, then that has been the target assigned toNiger, Cambodia and Honduras as well. Some of thistransfer to national goals was however by design, such asGoal Two which calls for universal completion of primaryschooling.But does it really make sense for all countries around theworld to have the same goals? Should China and CapeVerde be applying the same objectives and measuringsticks? More to the point, should we be determining the‘success’ or ‘failure’ of a country’s efforts at progress based