Achieving the Millennium
Development Goals Realistic, Possible?
Erna Witoelar,
the former Indonesian Minister for Settlements and Regional Infrastructure, was named the
first United Nations (UN) Special Ambassador for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
for Asia and the Pacific in September 2003. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed the
hope that her "talent and presence as part of the MDG Campaign will contribute reach
the hearts and minds of people around the world."
How does the Millennium Campaign and
your work as UN Special Ambassador for the MDGs fit within the context of the UN system,
and what does your work entail?
Within the UN system there are two main
supporting efforts to enable countries to reach the MDGs. One is the Millennium Project,
which is helping develop the right policies to reach the goals—whether in economics,
trade, or development. The other is the Millennium Campaign, which is facilitating
campaigns to make sure that the process is catalyzed. Both units are directly under the
Secretary General.
This is a new global solidarity momentum that
must go beyond government to help countries reach the goals and increase commitments to
reduce poverty, which in turn will help in achieving the rest of the goals.
My role is to get top-level commitment and
generate public awareness and pressure. I am campaigning among governments, civil society,
parliaments, universities, the private sector, and all other players; meeting government
poverty reduction teams and national planning boards; talking at universities; giving
interviews; and appearing on talk shows.
What commitments are you looking for
from the region’s developing countries to further their MDG agenda?
As the goals are holistic and interrelated,
the process of working together in partnerships at the national, regional, and global
levels is very important. To achieve the MDGs, all stakeholders have to participate
actively—not just governments. If we continue to conduct our development work in a
business-as-usual way, many of us [developing countries] won’t be able to reach the
goals.
Governments need to be constantly reminded of
the commitments they have already made to achieve the goals and that they should be really
serious and mainstream them in existing work. But the real implementation has to happen at
the local level. The better local governments are able to target and develop the right
interventions, the better will be the results on poverty reduction, health, sustainable
development, and education.
Many countries actually have money to reach
the goals, it is just that we have not been using it in an effective way. So good
governance is important, like accountability, participation, transparency, and minimizing
corruption.
What progress have you seen in the
region toward achieving the goals?
Some countries are more advanced in the MDG
process than others. Some have already reached certain goals in a short period. But they
have not viewed them in a holistic way that could then be used to reach the other goals.
Countries like Malaysia, for instance, have
already reached many of the goals and will be able to reach all of them by 2005, except
probably Goal 7 on sustainable development of the environment. In these cases, they need
to go beyond the goals to develop "MDG plus."
On Goal 3, gender and empowerment of women,
the target in the Philippines is not only to eliminate gender disparity at school level
but also in terms of reproductive rights, so the country can develop its own targets based
on the MDGs. The better we are able to define our targets, the faster we can reach them.
What needs to be sharpened is our capacity to
benchmark and note progress. There has been little work on this in the past because many
of our countries have weak statistical capacities.
The Millennium Compact in Monterrey
stated that international finance institutions (IFIs) should put the MDGs at the center of
their country strategies and programs. Is this happening?
I don’t think so. People know the
theory, people know the concept, but it is still at the conceptual level. In theory we
know that to reach the MDGs we have to be more holistic. But support from IFIs is still
sectoral. So the international community needs to coordinate better among itself.
The better the partnerships between IFIs and
multilateral and bilateral donors, the better will be the use of resources. We have to be
able to improve the use of existing resources, loans, and grants to make them more
effective.
Creditors of ADB, donors, IFIs, and the UN
are increasingly reforming their programs and processes toward achieving the MDGs. But if
we want to reach the goals by 2015, we all need to coordinate efforts. Aid is not
effective if every donor has its own strategy, each accompanied by complex procedures that
overburden poor countries’ institutional capacity. We must ensure the implementation
of the Rome Declaration on Harmonization.
When I was in the Government, I was very
upset because ADB had its own poverty strategy, the World Bank had its own poverty
strategy, and the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom had its
own poverty strategy for the same country — Indonesia. We were just observers of this
process. It was a case of their experts debating among themselves — about us. We
don’t have ownership of these processes. It is very important that we have ownership.
They don’t need to work for us, they have to work with us.
How would you like to see ADB
involving itself more in the MDG agenda?
ADB should readjust its existing programs and
existing approaches to better answer individual countries’ needs in reaching the
MDGs. It also needs to gradually move from direct local-level project intervention to more
strengthening of national and provincial capacity to develop and really implement pro-poor
policies because that is our weakness.
ADB has a lot of knowledge generated over
many decades. We could make more use of this. Our national governments need to be educated
on good practices. There is a big turnover of policymakers in these countries, so there is
a constant need to involve them again in understanding all this knowledge, instead of
reinventing the wheel. ADB at the regional level could coordinate better with other
regional players to be able to catalyze peer-to-peer learning of countries in this region.
Have you encountered much official
cynicism about achieving the MDGs?
There is skepticism in developing countries
of Asia and the Pacific that it is all just a way of packaging old stuff so that the UN,
the international community, World Bank, and other IFIs can make more business for
themselves.
There is also skepticism [in the developed
world] that national governments in developing countries are not committed enough to the
goals because they face so many distractions from internal political problems.
We have to stress that this is a global
solidarity for a new approach to partnerships with better ways of measuring progress. Then
we can move forward and each country can improve its ways of doing things to reach the
goals. And even after they have reached the goals, they can move forward from there,
because the goals themselves are very elementary and very basic.
What kind of reception have you
received from governments and the public in your first six months of work on the MDG
issue?
I’m pleasantly surprised to see how fast
people can be "MDG-ized." As soon people realized how the MDGs are linked with
their work, concerns, campaigns, they usually become interested and enthusiastic, despite
some initial skepticism. Governments’ reactions vary, especially regarding the need
to be more participatory in making the MDG reports. Some are quite reluctant to involve
civil society from the beginning for several reasons. Some are still coordinated by the
foreign ministry— maybe they don’t realize that the MDGs are not just the
governments’ pledges the international community, but, most important, they are an
obligation to their own people.
It’s amazing how little information on
MDGs exist in most of the countries for ordinary people. The MDGs are so far only owned by
the central governments, UN, and donor communities in the country. A lot still needs to be
done to make them owned at the local level. It’s at the local level that poverty
exists, and it’s at the local level that the MDGs can be achieved through a holistic
and integrated development approach.
(Courtesy ADB review) |
