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Ben Leo: Who Are The Millennium Development Goal Trailblazers?
August 24, 2010
Which countries are leading the pack on achieving the Millennium Development Goals? My guest this week is CGD research fellow Ben Leo. In a new working paper, Ben lays out an index for measuring country-level progress towards the MDGs. His paper, the first to offer comparative country-level rankings of progress towards key MDG-related indicators, finds some surprising trailblazers. Who knew that Honduras would come out on top!?
As the UN prepares for the MDG Review Summit next month, the conventional wisdom is that the global progress has been adequate—mostly because of China’s huge size and rapid poverty reduction—but that Africa lags sadly behind. Ben says that this view is overly simplistic, if not just plain wrong. Africa accounts for four of the fifteen countries ranked as “trailblazers,” on track to reach at least half of the examined MDG indicators by the 2015 target year (they are: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, and Uganda). Notwithstanding that the MDGs are wildly over ambitious given historical rates of progress (see here and here), Ben finds that low-income countries have made as much progress as middle-income countries. And some countries that we might expect to see on the trailblazer list, such as Tanzania, have performed poorly.
Listen to the Wonkcast then write to me to tell me what you think, or post a comment below. If you use iTunes, I invite you to subscribe to get a new episode delivered to your computer every week.
My thanks to Wren Elhai for his very able production assistance on the Wonkcast recording and for drafting this blog post.
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4 Responses to “Ben Leo: Who Are The Millennium Development Goal Trailblazers?”
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August 30th, 2010 at 6:34 am
I was a little surprised to hear about Tanzania’s progress because I always had the impression it was a stable developing economy, a little behind Kenya. What did surprise me is that Tanzania received $700 million in development aid and still showed a dismal progress rate. What went wrong? Tanzania isn’t known to suffer from endemic corruption or any recent natural disasters…And why did this country continue to receive so much money in the absence of results?
September 1st, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Fehmeen — You raise a number of very interesting questions about Tanzania’s performance. In fact, I was very surprised myself by its low MDG Progress Index score. I’m still looking into it, but it’s worth mentioning one thing upfront.
Tanzania’s poor Index showing may be driven largely by the baseline year selection. The MDGs’ baseline year is 1990 (i.e., ten years before the Millennium Declaration was ratified in 2000). As a result, developing countries already had 10 years worth of performance (or lack thereof) before the MDG process even got underway. Some countries – including many African ones – performed quite poorly during the 1990s in terms of economic growth and social indicators. However, performance during the 2000s, on average, was very substantial.
Tanzania illustrates this challenge with the broader MDG methodology. For example, income per capita declined, on average, by 0.3 percent a year during the 1990s. Its primary education completion rates also declined (from 63 percent in 1991 to 57 percent in 1999). Other indicators declined as well, such as child mortality.
However, Tanzania made very significant strides across a number of development-related indicators in the 2000s. Income per capita grew by nearly 4 percent a year between 2000 and 2008. Primary education completion rates increased by 50 percent (from 55 percent to 83 percent). And, child mortality rates fell significantly. Nonetheless, Tanzania’s poor performance during the 1990s more than offsets its more recent achievements.
My Progress Index takes the existing MDG framework as it stands. It’s the yardstick against which progress will be measured in 2015. Nonetheless, Tanzania’s example illustrates that the broader community should examine rates of improvement across different time periods as well. It won’t matter for the MDG exercise. But, it does matter for what happens after 2015. More to come on that later.
September 20th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
It’s safe to assume that the MDGs are one of those highly publicized initiatives doing well in the definitional rationale and falling short in the methodology approach as how results, impacts should be monitored… Inconsistency, lack or inappropriateness of such indicators/impacts is to date what’s plowing the visibility of countries that are at least engaged on the path to sustainability accordingly with the MDGs standards…
Such an above statement made me believe that IT’S GOING TO BE A SHIFT IN THE PARADIGM, NOT AN ACCRUED DEVELOPMENTAL ACHEIVEMENTS, THAT’S GOING TO SPRING OUT PROGESS MADE UNDER THE GUISE OF THE MDGs RATIONALE COMPLIANCE.
It’s time the donor community engage more on impact monitoring, most definitely participative impact monitoring (involving civil society actors) in order to scale up the least progress made in the developing world as long as they correspond to a MDG indicator… Without mentioning the ripple effect of such aggregate data relevant to achievements on the ground, used in most outdated scorecards, focusing on datamining has better days ahead.
September 29th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
You say that ‘Africa accounts for four of the fifteen countries ranked as “trailblazers”‘ but then list the African trailblazers as Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, and Uganda. Shouldn’t that be five of the fifteen, an even higher proportion?