Origin and Development of Millennium Development Goals

The ideas of the MDGs were an assemblage of a number of sector-specific development ideas and campaigns. For example, the World Summit on Social Development (WSSD), 1995 in Copenhagen helped to establish the basis for subsequent agreements for the MDGs.

The OECD’s report, A Better World for All, introduced the concept of international development goals, or IDGs.

4.3.1 The World Summit on Social Development (WSSD)

The WSSD was held in 1995 in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was the first major UN conference to focus specifically on social development issues. There were more than 14,000 delegates from 186 countries. Some 2,300 representatives from 811 non-governmental organizations were among the attendees (UN, 1995, p. 2). The conference resulted in the ‘Copenhagen Declaration’ (UN, 1995, p. 3), which recognized the need

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to put people at the center of development. It pledged to end poverty, improve employment opportunities and foster social integration (Scarnecchia & McKeegan, 2009, p. v). The ten commitments included: The eradication of absolute poverty by a target date set by participating countries, full employment as a basic policy goal, promotion of social integration based on the enhancement and protection of all human rights, achievement of gender equality and equity, acceleration of the development efforts of Africa and the least-developed countries (LDCs), inclusion of social development goals with structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), more allocation of resources to social development, the creation of an economic, political, social, cultural and legal environment which will encourage social development, the attainment of universal and equitable access to education and primary health care, and, strengthening the cooperation for social development through the UN. These commitments can be traced to UNICEF’s 1990 World Summit for Children, which took place in New York.

Recommendations for sustainable development have origins at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, which took place in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Processes can be traced to the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which took place in Cairo (Hulme & Scott, 2007, p. 7).

4.3.2 A Better World For All

The first report of its kind, the document introduced the concept of ‘international development goals’ (IDGs). It has addressed the most compelling of human desires – “a world free of poverty and free from the misery that poverty breeds” (IMF & Others, 2000, p. 1). The report identifies six IDGs such as: Halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, enrolment of all children in primary school, empowering women and eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education, reducing the infant and child mortality rates by two-thirds, reducing maternal mortality ratios by three quarters,

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providing the access for all who need reproductive health services, implementing national strategies for sustainable development, and reversing environmental degradation at both global and national levels (IMF & Others, 2000, p. 3).

It is also worth noting that the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD produced a report in 1996 entitled Shaping the 21st Century: the Contribution of Development Co-operation just after the Copenhagen conference of 1995. It also dealt with poverty, education, gender equality, infant and child mortality, maternal mortality, reproductive health, and environment and set to achieve by 2015. The report’s stated goals bear a striking resemblance to the Copenhagen commitments (Scarnecchia &

McKeegan, 2009, p. 10). The committee called for a reduction of one-half in the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, establishment of universal primary education in all countries, progress toward gender equality and the empowerment of women by eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education, a reduction by two-thirds in the mortality rates for infants and children under age 5, a reduction by three-fourths in maternal mortality, access to reproductive health services for all individuals of appropriate ages as soon as possible, and the implementation of national strategies for sustainable development for all countries by 2005 (OECD, 1996, p. 3-6).

International development agencies and institutions with anti-poverty agendas have produced a number of initiatives delineating comprehensive plans for international development. Plans to develop a global partnership for development were recognized in a 2001 UN General Assembly Resolution (UN, 2001). This coincides with the publication of the ‘Road Map Towards the Implementation of United Nations Millennium Declaration’

which created the eight specific MDGs (Scarnecchia & McKeegan, 2009, p. 2).

95 4.3.3 The United Nations ‘Road Map’ Document

The Millennium Development Goals were first introduced in the 2000 UN document entitled ‘Road Map Towards the Implementation of United Nations Millennium Declaration’. This was the final outcome of the Millennium Declaration of 2000 signed by 189 countries, including 147 Heads of State on the 8^th September 2000 (UN, 2000, p.

2). Its eight goals were to serve as a framework for the development activities of over 190 countries in ten regions (UN, 2008, p. 1). Initially, the IDG goals comprised of 18 targets with 48 indicators (UN, 20001, p. 3). The MDGs have expanded these to 21 targets and 60 indicators (UN, 2008, p. 2) through a process of ‘learning by doing’. The MDGs also included separate indicators for Least-Developed Countries (LDCs), Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs), Small Island Developing States (SIDS), and African states.

It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that the IDGs of A Better World For All were the primary inspiration for the MDGs. For Hulme (2007) “[t]his authoritative listing [of the MDGs] was carefully qualified. The list of millennium development goals does not undercut in any way agreements on other goals and targets reached at the global conferences of the 1990s” (Hume, 2007, p. 15). Table 8 demonstrates the evolution of these agendas.

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Table 8: Reconciliation of two sets of goals Millennium Source: Hulme, 2007, cf Colin Bradford, 2002.

The MDG’s targets and indicators for monitoring are inter-related and should be seen as a whole. They are “linked post hoc with indicators, for the purposes of measurement, and with goals, for the purpose of conceptual simplicity” (LIDC, 2010, p. 3). They established a partnership between developed and developing countries, which sought

“to create an environment – at the national and global levels alike – which [was]

conducive to development and the elimination of poverty” (UN, 2000, p. 9). However, the MDGs are yet proved a viable strategy to escape poverty. According to the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE):

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Although the MDGs have encouraged improvements in the livelihood of the poor throughout the world by stressing the necessity of providing food, education and health, a strategy for the poor to actually get out of poverty has yet to be formulated. Since the only resource, the poor possess for earning income is labor, employment must be a key. However, employment is not placed in the center of the MDGs. Meanwhile, the experience of poverty reduction in East Asia reveals that the creation of employment opportunities in the export-oriented industrial sector is critical. The East Asian pattern of poverty reduction through industrial development is now occurring in South Asia as well. This observation may imply that the East Asian strategy can be applied to current low-income countries (IDE JETRO, 2005, pp. 39-40).