[afro-nets] The Millennium Development Goals Report 2006 (2)

["Peter Burgess" <profitinafrica@gmail.com>]

The Millennium Development Goals Report 2006 (2)
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Dear Colleagues

Thank you, Claudio for alerting me to the MDG Goals Report for 2006.

For anyone with an interest in seeing success in Africa, the overview is a disaster. This is, of course, not news.

I have considered the MDG approach to relief and development something of a fiasco from the start. As someone who has done management information design for most of my career, a process that looks out 15 years is likely to accomplish little unless it is complemented by serious short term action plans that really do reflect the longer term goals, and there is strong focus on these short term actions and their results. But that was never the case with the MDG process. Bill Easterly from NYU describes the situation very well in his book "The White Man's Burden" ... a good book with a rotten title.

This MDG Goals Report for 2006 highlights the terrible lack of
progress in Sub Sahara Africa (SSA). 11 items in the "no progress, or a deterioration or reversal" and 7 items in the "target is not expected to be met by 2015 if prevailing trends persist. None better than that.

In contrast East Asia has 3 items in the "target already met", 6 items in the "target is expected to be met ..." and just 3 in the "no progress or a deterioration or reversal".

Southeastern Asia is almost as good: 2 items in the "target already met" group,  7 items in the "target is expected to be met ..." group and just 2 items in the "no progress or a deterioration or reversal" group.

Leadership in the international relief and development sector (RDS) should be drawing some lessons from this ... it is well known that relief and development progress reflects almost total failure of the process ... but at the end of the day the RDS experts recommend doing the same things over and over again with more money and expecting different performance. The big questions of HOW and WHY there is relief and development failure is not asked out loud ... in big part because there are far too many people who are quite happy with the status quo.

Where has the money gone? What has it been used for? What results of any tangible value have been achieved? These are legitimate questions, and though not very challenging academically, none of the RDS organizations or the RDS leadership (people) seem willing or able to give solid answers. It really is a sad and unacceptable state of affairs.

Are there any changes in progress that might give cause for optimism? Maybe. There are many professional and technical people in Africa who could make a difference, but they need opportunity ... not just to become involved in more dialog, but to actually do productive work that has durable value in the context of the African community. It is a step to integrate African academics into the global dialog, but this is only an interim step ... there has to be conversion of academic work into applications and tangible economic goods and services of value.

Will the needed opportunity ever have access to funding? A weaker maybe. But without this Africa will not do very well. This is not achieved by debt relief of government debt ... but needs modest amounts of real money in the right places. It can be done, but some hard work is needed to attract the capital into this ... and very little has been done on this up to now.

In our own little way, we are moving ahead in these directions ... now it is malaria (with an integrated mosquito and malaria control program strategy) ... soon it will be community level job creation ... and then .......  we shall see.

But one thing we know ... going out 15 years with our goals in not our idea of how to manage a difficult process effectively, though it does employ a lot of report writers and analysts!

Sincerely

Peter Burgess
Transparency and Accountability Network
mailto:profitinafrica@gmail.com