Global goals, local needs

So many UN goals remain unfulfilled -- will the Millennium Development Goals mark a break with tradition? Fatemah Farag attends a conference in Beirut where Arab civil society activists discussed MDG strategies

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The Millennium Declaration was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2000, when an unprecedented gathering of heads of state from 189 countries agreed to work together to build a safer, more prosperous and equitable world for all by 2015. The declaration was broken down into eight objectives known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which include targets such as eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five as well as ensuring environmental sustainability.

However, four years down the line, Marisol Sanjines of the New York-based MDG Campaign Office told regional civil society activists in Beirut, "it is the lack of political will that is the biggest stumbling block to the achievement of the MDGs. The campaign therefore will focus on the national level and below, while recognising the need to influence global processes."

Sanjines addressed the Strategic Planning Workshop for the Regional Campaign for the MDGs in the Arab Region organised by the Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND) in Beirut from 1 to 3 April. The conference was attended by UNDP representatives from Lebanon, Tunisia and Sudan, as well as representatives of civil society organisations (CSOs) from across the region. She argued that CSOs have an interest in taking into consideration the MDGs since they "have become a part of mainstream development discourse, not just for donors but also for Southern governments ... [And] the goals offer important points of leverage for CSOs struggling to bring social aspects into national planning processes."

Further, Nada Al-Nashif, deputy resident representative at the UNDP office in Beirut, also representing the UNDP's Regional Bureau, said: "With the plans now well advanced for a Global Summit in 2005 at the UN headquarters in New York to mark the fifth anniversary of the Millennium Declaration ... this year represents the last opportunity for world leaders to follow through on their pledges and make the necessary breakthroughs on domestic reforms to accelerate MDG progress as well as scaling up development assistance, agreeing on a development-friendly new trade round, and making real progress in other areas such as technology transfer, if we are to meet the 2015 deadline."

And there is much at stake in the Arab region. Ziad Abdul-Samad, executive director of ANND, remarked, "the economic and social conditions in the Arab world are increasingly bad, and the Arab Human Development Report published by the UNDP shows that the indicators in the Arab world are amongst the worst in the world. And despite the progress achieved by Arab countries in past decades in several areas, the pace of progress has decreased in the 1990s, thus exacerbating developmental challenges. The Arab world faces the additional challenge of the lack of democracy and continuous violation of human rights."

According to a background paper issued by ANND, "addressing development issues in the Arab countries through working on a regional MDGs campaign will be an effective means of confronting these challenges and working towards sustainable change."

Abdel-Samad acknowledges, however, that the "MDGs are a step back from the commitments made by world governments in [the Social Summit in] Copenhagen in 1995. Despite this it could be argued that there is a greater political commitment to MDGs." However, Neamat Kuku of the Sudanese Gender Centre for Research noted, "we must be clear that the signing of agreements does not mean political commitment. If the MDGs are not transformed into programmes and budgets they remain ink on paper and do not go beyond ceremony and carnivals."

It is noteworthy that the process that brought about the MDGs was not exactly participatory. The UN Secretariat took the leading role in drafting the declaration while there was no direct role for civil society in the Millennium Summit. "As a result the MDGs are still largely unknown to civil society organizations at the national level, and there isn't the same feeling of 'ownership' as citizen groups have with respect to other UN-established international commitments," says Robert Bissio, coordinator of Social Watch in an article entitled "Civil Society and the MDGs" published in the UNDP Development Policy Journal.

At the Beirut conference, one CSO representative after another lamented the fact that they had not been included in MDG country report processes. In the case of Egypt none of the CSO representatives had even heard of MDG implementation in Egypt, despite the fact that the UNDP office in Cairo is said to have completed one country report and is in the process of finishing a second one. Similarly, the Moroccan delegation had to obtain a copy of its own country report from the Internet. According to Salah Eddin Al-Jorchi, of the Ligue Tunisienne de Dro”ts de l'Homme (The Tunisian League for Human Rights), "the United Nations seems to have a problem making the distinction between civil society and government."

Even in countries where the process has been more participatory, such as in Sudan and Lebanon, the gap between the UNDP and CSOs remains. "UNDP/civil society partnership does not really exist. The UNDP is not really playing a role in empowering civil society, and I wonder where the UN stands in its relationship to the people of the world," asked Jomana Merthe of the Lebanese Women Democratic Gathering.

The declaration does, however, commit governments "to develop strong partnerships with the private sector and civil society in general to contribute to the realisation of the organisation's goals and programmes".

Regional CSOs were offered inspiration from experiences in Latin America. Representing Social Watch, Patricia Garce from Uruguay explained, "[MDG] indicators should be adjusted to fit a country's context. For example, in Uruguay poverty -- as defined by MDGs at less that one dollar per day -- would affect only 0.5 per cent of the population. This was the battle undertaken by CSOs to adjust indicators to national requirements. The appropriation by governments of processes is old fashioned."

In fact, the question of whether MDGs reflect the concerns of middle-income developing countries, countries in transition or poor and vulnerable groups within the developed world is a pertinent one. Delegates from the Gulf countries pointed out that several of the MDGs were irrelevant to their societies, which have already surpassed specific indicators.

Even in the case of Egypt, a country that suffers widespread poverty, delegates questioned the relevance of a "one dollar per day" poverty line. "The question we must ask ourselves is which of the goals and indicators we are going to defend and why," said Hani Shukrallah, managing editor of Al- Ahram Weekly, one of the Egyptian delegates at the conference. "For CSOs to have a stake in advocating the goals and working for their realisation they have to take ownership of them, which means adapting the MDGs to the priorities and needs of their respective societies," he added.

Abdel-Samad brought home the relevance of this point in his discussion of MDG number eight, which calls for "developing further an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non- discriminatory, [one that] includes a commitment to good governance, development and poverty reduction -- nationally and internationally". According to Abdel-Samad, "As opposed to the other seven goals this is not a quantitative one and is open to many interpretations. In Lebanon our battle was to convince the government to adopt a critical approach to goal eight. How can a country that spends 40 per cent of its GDP on debt financing be expected to develop? And should this mean further liberalisation of our national economies or maybe something else?"

This is a complex and problematic consideration. Social Watch's Bissio pointed out in his article that "globalisation has already limited enormously, through binding international trade agreements or the conditionalities imposed by the international financial institutions, the menu of economic policies from which governments (and consequently citizens) can actually choose. And there is a risk that they might be reduced even more, further undermining sovereignty and rendering democracy useless."

Towards adopting an understanding of the MDGs that would boost development in the Arab world, the participants formulated the outlines of strategic plans for nine Arab countries over the three-day duration of the conference.

Of course, national commitment and understanding are only part of the battle that must be faced. The first major UN conference after the approval of the Millennium Goals was the Monterrey Summit on Financing for Development, which estimated that between a further $50 to $100 billion in aid would be required annually to finance MDGs. However, even the most conservative estimate would require a doubling of current aid levels and would still fall short of the commitment made in the 1970s by developed countries to contribute 0.7 per cent of their GDP to development.