What Next for the Millennium Development Goals?

Abstract

It is just about time for yet another round of international development goals. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the eight goals, 20 targets and 60+ indicators that came out of the United Nations in 2000 – are coming to the end of their natural life. Although the official end date is not until 2015, if your country is not close to reaching the MDGs now, there is simply not much time to catch up. (Helpfully, the UN’s MDG Monitor website counts down to 2015 by the second.) As 2015 ticks ever closer, international bureaucrats (and I use that term affectionately since I have been one) are deciding how to cook up the next round of goals. We can be assured that there will be another round of MDG-like goals sometime fairly soon because this has been the consistent pattern for much of the last century. My colleague Michael Clemens documents how global universal primary education has been repeatedly promised by grand international summits since at least 1934, even if their actual impact has been questionable (Clemens, 2004). So what should MDGs redux look like if we want them to be constructive and not merely more of the same? A good place to start is to consider the pluses and minuses of the current set. On the positive side, the MDGs have been hugely successful at fundraising. The MDGs evolved out of a set of goals created at the OECD in the mid-1990s as a direct attempt to try to reverse the steep cuts in foreign aid after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Total aid plummeted by more than 20 per cent between 1992 and 1997, prompting waves of panic within the aid community. At the time of the September 2000 UN Summit when the MDGs were adopted unanimously by the largest-ever gathering of heads of state, total aid was around $60 billion per year. By 2005 the level had doubled to around $120 billion and it has hovered around this level ever since. Coincidentally, a series of ‘MDG costing studies’ suggested that just such a doubling was necessary for those goals to be achieved (Devarajan et al., 2002; Zedillo, 2001). Finding out what is actually happening on the ground not only helps to establish if money and effort are reaching their intended objectives, but also helps to make critical efficiency decisions. A link between the MDGs and this spike in aid seems highly plausible. Nearly all donor countries justified their increases on the basis of, if not directly meeting the MDGs, helping to reach MDG-like goals, such as fighting poverty, educating children or stemming the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Another useful contribution of the MDGs has been to focus the development community – and the taxpaying public – on outcomes, if somewhat belatedly. Although it seems 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 were bought, etc., rather than on the hoped-for changes in countries, such as healthier and more educated people. Finding out what is actually happening on the ground not only helps to establish if money and effort are reaching their intended objectives, but also helps to make critical efficiency decisions. If we aim for educated children, a logical first step is at least to know how many kids are enrolled in school. It also provides a baseline for deeper evaluation that can help make policy decisions, such as: is it better to use additional marginal dollars to build schools or pay teachers higher salaries or fight diseases that too often keep kids out of school? In fact, the approach of finding out how we are actually doing is obvious now in part because of the MDGs. Tracking and reporting have become mainstream – and it is not too much of a stretch to give the goals part of the credit. Yet, the MDGs also have some serious weaknesses. While the goals were initially intended as global aspirations, they quickly became actual targets for countries. Some of this was (likely well-intentioned if lazy) misuse of the goals as a replacement for national targets. If Goal Five says that the maternal mortality ratio should be reduced by three-quarters, then that has been the target assigned to Niger, Cambodia and Honduras as well. Some of this transfer to national goals was however by design, such as Goal Two which calls for universal completion of primary schooling. But does it really make sense for all countries around the world to have the same goals? Should China and Cape Verde be applying the same objectives and measuring sticks? More to the point, should we be determining the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of a country’s efforts at progress based on the MDGs? (Or, to use the common UN language, is this the way to determine if countries are ‘on track’ or ‘off track’?) Given the vast disparity of starting points and diversity of country capabilities, using a universal measuring stick seems not just simplistic but absurd. Worse, the targets are unrealistically ambitious for many countries. A large number of nations, including almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, have thus been set up to fall short regardless of how much progress they make. This problem seems especially worrisome since the way the specific MDG targets were selected almost guaranteed that sub-Saharan Africa would ‘fail’ (Clemens et al., 2007; Easterly, 2009). The MDGs thus are not only dispiriting (rather than inspiring) for policy makers in many developing countries, but they also mistakenly label some high performers as losers. Several governments that have been showing very strong rates of improvement – such as Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Liberia – are nonetheless going to miss almost all of the MDGs by a wide margin. Does it make sense for the international development community to dismiss such efforts because of arbitrary global goals set at a UN summit? Or would the policy makers in Ouagadougou, Maputo and Monrovia be better supported by clear recognition of their successes? The MDGs are simply not good indicators of success or failure – and thus decidedly not operational. The revival of the old inane debate over whether aid works at all also seems partly traceable to the succession of long lists of countries still ‘off track’ on the MDGs despite tens of billions of additional dollars spent on development assistance. Another downside outcome of the MDGs is that they inherently oversell what aid can achieve – and thus add to pessimism over aid, which is precisely the opposite intention of the original Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) goals. It is no coincidence that we are seeing a resurgence now in anti-aid arguments – for instance in the wild popularity of Dambisa Moyo’s book, Dead Aid (2009). The revival of the old inane debate over whether aid works at all also seems partly traceable to the succession of long lists of countries still ‘off track’ on the MDGs despite tens of billions of additional dollars spent on development assistance. The final big flaw of the MDGs is that, despite their grand claims of mutual accountability, they actually hold no one accountable at all. When the MDGs are not reached, who is responsible? If everyone, then no one. (The real test of accountability is: will anyone get fired in 2015?) Instead we are likely to get just finger pointing and whining about ‘broken promises’: donors will say that recipients did not make all the policy changes that were required; recipients will say they did not get enough money; many NGOs will grumpily blame both sides. And it is not just that collective accountability does not work. The outcomes embodied in the MDGs are not directly attributable to spending, actions, policies or all the other efforts that are being made in their pursuit. The causes of child mortality, for instance, are multiple and complex – and outside the control of any individual actor. Thus, it is not only that the MDGs do not assign accountability for child mortality to any particular institution; by the very nature of the goals, it is impossible to do so (Clemens et al., 2007). In an ideal world, we could avoid all the circus of UN summits and misleading use of targets and finger pointing by just abandoning utopian global goals. However, given the cycle of the past and the dynamics within international organizations, another round of MDG-like goals seems inevitable. A second-best approach is to try to fix them based on the following principles that directly try to address some of the shortcomings. Any new MDGs should be: Bottom up, not global down. New global goals should be based on the aggregation of each country’s targets rather than setting a world goal and then retrofitting targets to country plans. Based on ambitious yet reasonably achievable expectations. New country-based goals must take into account the context and starting point of each country’s circumstances, combined with bold yet practicable improvements. It took the United States from 1800 to 1905 to make the transition from 40 per cent school enrollment to universal coverage. Expecting countries currently at a similar 40–50 per cent level (like Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso or Senegal) to race ahead to 100 per cent completion rates in just 15 years seems utterly unworkable. Aimed, where possible, on intermediate outcomes. A requisite for upholding even a modicum of accountability means picking targets that are more closely linked to things under control of the relevant actors. For instance, health officials and their partners in donor agencies have much more scope to influence immunization rates than overall child mortality rates. Considered warning markers rather than operational goals. Global goals are useful in letting us know where we are and as a signal for where we hope to be one day. They also can add pressure on governments, in both the rich and poor worlds, to identify where they may need to apply additional efforts and arm their own citizens with information. Yet such benchmarks are not necessarily useful either for making funding decisions or for assigning praise or condemnation to regimes or the development community as a whole. Able to identify success. Scorecards of progress should be able to identify and celebrate success of those countries ahead of the curve and being creative in enhancing the lives of their people. There are many other goals that could be added to the mostly social indicators currently on the MDG list. My ideal set of goals would include things like job creation, access to electricity and, perhaps, bank accounts – things that help generate economic opportunity and are the only sustainable path out of poverty and aid dependency. If we fail to adapt the next round of international development goals, we are likely to remain stuck in a cycle of well-meaning but ultimately empty global aspirations – and destined to having the same debate, yet again, in 2030.