THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS AND PARLIAMENTARY SCRUTINY
The Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved in just over three years without strong, effective and sometimes innovative involvement by Parliaments, say senior officials in the field of parliamentary strengthening at the United Nations Development Programme.
Mr Kevin Deveaux and Mr Cédric Jurgensen in New
York. Mr Deveaux, a former Member of the Legislative Assembly of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, is the Parliamentary Development Policy Adviser in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Mr Jurgensen is a UNDP Parliamentary Development Adviser. This article reflects the views of its authors and not necessarily those of the UNDP, its Executive Board or United Nations member states.
In September 2000, 189 world leaders pledged together, through the United Nations Millennium Declaration, to take appropriate measures by 2015 to reduce poverty and inequalities, fight diseases and illiteracy, and to protect the environment. They officially committed themselves to “making the right to development a reality for everyone and to freeing the entire human race from want”. Beyond this general
commitment, they agreed on a precise agenda: the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comprising 8 Goals, 21 numerical targets and 60 quantifiable indicators to help governments develop appropriate strategies and allow civil society and international organizations to follow-up progress made on reducing poverty and hunger, improving the situation of disadvantaged populations and fighting climate change. The universal approach of the
MDGs was both innovative and fully in accordance with the role of the United Nations (UN) in the field of development. Thanks to
318 | The Parliamentarian | 2011: Issue Four
Mr Kevin Deveaux
this global consensus on priorities for development, since 2000 serious progress has been made worldwide on poverty reduction, access to primary education and to safe water – even if in many developing countries child mortality and maternal health remain especially challenging.1
For
instance, a woman dies every minute from complications related to pregnancy or during the six weeks following delivery; 99 per cent of these 500,000 deaths occur each year in developing countries.
Concrete results vary
Mr Cédric Jurgensen
significantly from one country to another, depending on economic and social constraints but also on the strength of political mobilization. For example, in many cases gaps appeared between the formulation of policies intended to achieve MDGs and their concrete implementation that require appropriate resource allocations on the ground. Such situations happen more often when civic and political engagement is not encouraged and when civil society is not able to effectively hold governments to account on budget and law-making. In India for