Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
Last week saw the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Agenda meeting in Liberia. Apparently various panel members used the occasion to lay out their vision for goals and targets for 2030. And according to Save the Children’s Brendan Cox, there was a lot of discussion around the “fact that we can get to zero on so many issues.” Save the Children’s very interesting report on post-2015 is heavy on
Last week saw the opening meeting of the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda –AKA the HiPoPoDomAe. That’s the body set up by the UN Secretary General to mull what follows on from the Millennium Development Goals. There’s a brief round-up of some of what was said here. Reports of the discussion, some wonderful meetings in London two weeks ago, and recent interventions from Ben Leo at the ONE campaign as well as the WEF Global Agenda Council on Benchmarki
Good question as the world prepares for the September summit to assess progress. But this is a slightly odd debate here at The Africa Report. The UN Millennium Promise’s Charles Abugre Akelyira seems to think the MDGs are a rejection of economic policy reform:
This September the UN will host another major summit to evaluate progress toward the Millennium Development Goals -- the 8 goals, 20 targets and 60+ indicators agreed at the UN summit a decade ago. Bill Easterly reminds us today that the way the particular goals were chosen made it almost impossible for Africa to “succeed”.
I attended a conference convened and hosted by Jean-Michel Severino, the head of the French bilateral agency, outside Paris last week. The question participants addressed was: What should be the goals of the international development community in the post-MDG period after 2015? Should the MDGs be retrofitted and complemented with g
While participating in an interesting and thoughtful eDiscussion organized by the UNDP on Securing Fiscal space for the MDGs, I was struck by how much different approaches to the issue-say between the IMF and the UNDP-are driven by different implicit assumptions about the likely effectiveness of additional spending.
The Copenhagen Consensus Project recently asked a group of 24 UN ambassadors and other diplomats to prioritize a list of 40 global development interventions. The US was there. Their interesting report places heath and sanitation on top, with education and hunger somewhat lower. Trade, financial, and environmental policies received lowest priority, due in part to political infeasibility.
Nine years from the 2015 deadline of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it is already clear that these fantastically utopian goals will label many development successes as failures. If you doubt this, look at how the MDGs are being used in some of Africa’s bright spots.
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