Global Development: Views from the Center
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April 03, 2006
How the MDGs guarantee failure
Posted by Michael Clemens at 12:50 PM
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.
The Kenyan Health Ministry points out that the child mortality rate--which rose substantially under the venal Moi regime--has fallen from 120 to 115 under the new government. This is very good, and steady continuation of such progress should be celebrated. But the Ministry has adopted the impossible MDG of just 32 (number of deaths out of 1000) by 2015. A titanic leap like that is impossible and totally irrelevant to Kenya’s reality. The target was imported uncritically from New York; it guarantees failure.
The authors of the Senegal MDG country report consider it “probable” that Senegal will achieve the MDG of universal primary school completion by 2015. This despite the fact that 43% of primary school age children have never walked into a school, and of those that do enter, 44% drop out before completion. No country in history has ever raised school completion rates at even half that speed, even countries with dramatically more favorable circumstances than Senegal. A target like that ensures failure--not because of bad donors or bad governance, but because of the target itself. How about ignoring the MDG and instead celebrating the steady rise in Senegal’s school enrollments?
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Comments
Good points, Michael, especially since we've all been told so often that the MDGs aren't necessarily individual country goals. But, sadly, Senegal and Kenya are not alone - lots of poor countries have just adopted the MDGs even if they make no sense their contexts.
One other thing is that it's not only poor countries which have embraced unrealistic goals. What about the 3x5 campaign (to get 3 million people on ARVs by 2005) which the WHO has just said was missed by a longshot? Apparently they only reached 1.3 million, less than half of the target. So, is this failure or a success? We don't know because the target was set based on some silly slogan rather than on sound analysis. (And, in case Bill Easterly is reading, who will be held accountable for the 1.7 million who got "missed"? If it's everybody, then it's nobody.)
Posted by: Todd Moss at April 3, 2006 06:13 PM
Let us not forgot Attaran's point about the MDGs as well, namely that we often do not know what burden certain problems place upon a country. If we do not have a baseline, how can we know when or if we are achieving a goal? Even such a relatively highly studied data point such as HIV prevalence in Africa can shift, sometimes substantially, as new information appears (witness the reported prevalence fall recently in many countries which seems to have come about not because of successful interventions, but rather because prior estimates were too high.)
Posted by: Stewart Parkinson at April 4, 2006 07:13 PM