Progress of the Millennium Development Goals AMBROISE TINE
More aid, better spent D
r Martin Luther King said that over the bleached bones of numer- ous civilisations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” For
many millions of people those words are already stamped over the broken millennium promise to lift them out of poverty. In 2000, governments came together to pledge to build a better world for humanity by 2015. The Millennium Declaration was a milestone in cooperation, committing the 189 member states of the United Nations to ambi- tious but achievable targets. The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) range from cutting child and mater- nal mortality to halving the number of people who go hungry. With five years to go, none of the goals will be universally met. Some are moving forward, but some are decades off track. Significant progress has been made in places. With money freed from international debt cancellation, countries in Africa opened schools and recruited teachers. When school fees were abolished in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, seven million additional children started going to school. There has been a 10-fold increase in anti-
retroviral treatment for HIV/Aids in the last five years. The impact on patients who receive the right care and on the communities in which they live has been a joy to witness. No
Over the next five years, £21 billion could save 11 million African women and children. Photo: Simon Rawles for Cafod
longer as church workers are we simply reduced to providing palliative care to the dying. We see people with the virus living healthy lives, finding work and even starting families. In my own country of Senegal, two-thirds of the population lived in extreme poverty in 1990. Only a third does today. Still too many, but nevertheless a remarkable achievement. Those examples are reasons to celebrate, but they are also reasons to ask why more hasn’t been done. They show that aid does work. They highlight the lives that could have
Rich countries failed to invest sufficiently in aid to the developing world during the boom years and are failing even more in these straitened times. So has the Millennium project to halve poverty by 2015 failed? This is the big question for world leaders at a UN summit on Monday in New York
been saved over the last 10 years if the support from donor coun- tries during an economic boom period had been in place. The failures for not doing so make grim reading. One in seven chil- dren in Africa don’t live to see their fifth birthday. Globally, 8.8 million children died in 2008. Four diseases – pneumonia, diar- rhoea, malaria and Aids – accounted for 43 per cent of those deaths. Low-cost preven- tion and treatments exist for
them all. Maternal mortality – a mother dying in childbirth – reaches deep into the endless cycle of poverty. A child that loses its mother will be poorer, hungrier and will have less chance of going to school, especially if she is a girl. An uneducated girl will be more likely to become pregnant too young. Girls who give birth before they are 15 are five times more likely to die than women in their twenties. In poor countries, the day a child is born is all too often the day its mother dies. In the developed world, the risk of dying in preg- nancy and childbirth is one in 7,300. In Asia it’s one in 120, and in Africa a shocking one in 22. More than half a million women die in pregnancy and childbirth every year –
20 | THE TABLET | 18 September 2010
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