"Bring the Millennium Development Goals on to the Streets"

The development community has declared 2005 to be the decisive year for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In this interview, Eveline Herfkens, UN Coordinator for the MDGs Campaign, explains what has to be done now to move closer to the goals.

Ms. Herfkens, which goals will be achieved, which not?

Eveline Herfkens: Goal one, halving the number of poor people, is definitely on track – but only because China has so much weight globally and is doing fine. That means we will achieve the poverty goal by automatic pilot. But this is not what it was about originally. Rather, the idea was to see progress in every country. When you look at various regions you see that eastern Asia, northern Africa and Latin America could basically achieve the goals by themselves. In these regions, there is a lot of progress.

The real problem is Sub-Saharan Africa, which is caught in a poverty trap. It is too poor to make the necessary investments, and it is here that we face the biggest problems. However, even in Africa, hidden in the average numbers, we also find some success stories. At least ten countries, including Rwanda, Uganda, Mali, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania, will achieve the education goal. Some countries like Mozambique will also achieve the poverty goal.

What makes these countries success stories?

Herfkens: They are successful because the "global deal" agreed upon in Monterrey three years ago is working here. According to this deal, poor countries have to take primary responsibility for the first seven goals whereas the donors are bound to goal number eight, i.e. promoting development partnerships.

That means the successful countries have relative good policies in the relevant sectors. On the other hand, the international community has been relatively generous in their cases in terms of the volume of aid, the untying of aid, budget support, but also with regard to debt relief.

There is a lot of talk about money . . .

Herfkens: Yes, sometimes it's like an obsession . . .

. . . however, besides increasing aid, what policies are most urgent to bring the problematic countries back on track?

Herfkens: This is very country-specific. Wherever I listen to people in Africa, it turns out that the AIDS target is clearly overarching everything else. In the Middle East, on the other hand, many governments haven't understood yet that you cannot develop a country while stifling the creativity of half of your people. So here the gender issue is at stake. Some countries in East Asia face huge environmental problems, whereas the first goal, poverty reduction, is very important in Latin America.

The level of inequality in Latin American societies is so huge that the poorest groups like marginalised ethnic communities or poor farmers simply do not benefit from development.

What role can the private sector play?

Herfkens: It can do a lot, but it is difficult to make a general statement. With regard to extractive industries it would be very important that companies join the Publish What You Pay campaign to prevent oil revenues from being stolen from the people and to ensure that people can hold their governments accountable for the money.

On the other hand, private banks must be aware that poor people have no access to credits. Until now, micro-credit is mainly an NGO-like business, but there are many small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries, which urgently need bank credits. Thirdly, the agro-business: in my position as Dutch development minister I discussed with the biggest supermarket company in the Netherlands, Albert Heijn, whether it would be feasible to import bananas not from southern Ghana but from the poorer regions in the north.

In short, what a company can actually do depends on its business. However, one important thing that big companies should generally do is to speak out that they care for the MDGs, that governments should reach the 0.7 % aid target, and, like the Unilever CEO Niall FitzGerald did, that agricultural subsidies are destructive.

Do you think that it was a mistake to declare the MDGs five years ago without drafting a detailed plan for reaching them and without assigning binding duties?

Herfkens: I don't think it was a mistake, because there can't be such a thing as a detailed plan. Country by country, life is different, issues are different, problems are different. We don't need a global plan; rather we need plans for every single country. That's exactly the conclusion of Jeffrey Sachs's report: in general we know what to do, but the detailed business plans should be country-specific. We should not write blueprints for development in offices at the United Nations or in Berlin. This must be done locally.

But isn't this the problem with Sachs's Millennium Project report? Critics say it's just another grandiose plan to make a better world . . .

Herfkens: The point Jeffrey Sachs very powerfully makes is the affordability and the feasibility of the MDGs. Ever since I have been campaigning for the MDGs I have noticed that many people think they are neither affordable nor achievable. What Jeffrey Sachs and his team made very clear is that this is not true if the international community takes serious what it has promised.

But this is something the UN and you yourself already have pointed to many times before in the last years. What is the practical use of the Sachs report?

Herfkens: With this business plan we may become able to convince people that, so far, we were unable to convince. That's what we always hope. They may not buy it from me but maybe from the authority of these thousands of pages.

There were other agreements before the MDGs like the 20:20 initiative, according to which donors and recipients pledged funds for social causes such as education and health. Nobody is talking about that anymore . . .

Herfkens: No, that's not true. A lot of donors actually have implemented the 20:20 initiative as well as the successful countries in Sub-Saharan Africa I mentioned earlier. The initiative might not be the bumper sticker of today but it has been very instrumental in terms of getting a focus.

The MDGs are much more ambitious than the 20:20 initiative was. Don't you fear that the UN summit has promised more than can be delivered?

Herfkens: No. Two things are really different with the MDGs compared to any earlier effort to set targets at the UN. Firstly, the MDGs have been promised at the level of heads of states or government leaders. Earlier targets, for example on education and health, were agreed in the World Health Organisation or the UNESCO with health or education ministers. Then these ministers came home and talked to finance ministers who said: "That's fine but, sorry, I have nothing to do with it." With the MDGs you can call on the whole government.

Secondly, a study on thirty years of target setting at the UN shows that, in every case, movement towards the targets has been accelerated even if the targets were not met. The study also shows that the degree of success depended on only one factor, namely the degree of mobilisation beyond the UN bureaucrats and the development community. Seen from this perspective I think the MDGs already have delivered more than any initiative before.

What are the implications of the international relief effort for the tsunami victims for longer-term development cooperation?

Herfkens: My short-term concern is that countries might increase emergency aid at the expense of long-term development cooperation. That would mean that the poor in Africa pay for the people in Asia. In the longer run, I think the tsunami disaster shows that people in rich countries can be very generous when confronted with the misery in which the other half of world population lives.

The tragedy is that the silent tsunamis like poverty, hunger and diseases that kill every day do not make the headlines on the front-pages. So the task of an effective Millennium Development Goal campaign is to make people aware of these long-term killers. The tsunami shows that politicians are very eager to show that they care if their electorate did so before. That means if we can translate the pouring out of hearts for this disaster into pouring out of hearts for the silent killers, then politicians will care about them too.

How can this be accomplished?

Herfkens: By getting more mobilisation beyond the development community, by not just organising seminars with people who have been to similar seminars five times before. By trying to bring the issue on to the streets and into the mainstream debates. That would make a difference.

Interview: Tillmann Elliesen

Eveline Herfkens is the Secretary-General's Executive Coordinator for the Millennium Development Goals Campaign. Before she was the Dutch Development Minister for four years.

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