Beyond the MDGs- who's watching?

Today, when JM's health blogger brought up the example of the eradication of small pox as an example of how 'we can do it' (eradicate major health problems in the fight against poverty) and in the process achieve the Millenium Development Goals - MDGs - it made me think about the current flurry of debates arising around the MDGs. The original goal was that they would be accomplished by 2015. It is now 2010.  There is a major UN meeting this coming September - and many, many people are spending a lot of time accessing the progress, the point and the impact of the MDGs. Has there been some progress? Sure. Some.  Especially thanks to China and India. But it is hard to say that their poverty irradication had much to do with the MDGs.

I first came across the MDGs in Kenya. They were stuck on many a wall in many an aid office - a check list of what was needed for a good society. And the posters looked like just that - posters. Nothing more. They didn't feel grounded in Kenyan reality, or in the work that people were doing. Most on-the-ground programme officers I met just shrugged. Sure, we all want lower infant mortality - and those who are smart will link the good work they are already doing for sustainable development to the MDgs, and it will help them get funding. But most poor folks hadn't heard about the MDGs (unless you were in Sachs' Millenium Village).  So I felt that they weren't particularly important - indeed, they seemed more annoying than anything else. Research and thinking on the MDGs has tended to be polarized - you either love them or hate them.

Until I met Andy Sumner. He's tall, wiry, tons of  (often scattered) energy who has mastered multi-tasking, and is wonderfully down to earth. When I said, well, what's the big deal about the MDGs, he looked at me like I was crazy. As he has said, advocates of the MDG approach believe it provides a rallying call for placing multi-dimensional poverty reduction at the centre of development efforts. The MDGs are thus viewed as a set of indicators for guiding poverty reduction and for holding international agencies and governments accountable to citizens.

Those less convinced see the MDG approach as a donor-led, reductionist agenda that pays little attention to locally defined and owned definitions of progress and development. Yeah, that would be me. Have the galvanised action? Yes. Have they made a difference? Hard to say.   As Andy says, the MDGs are different things to different people. They are a set of indicators, but they are also an idea or 'global norm' for poverty reduction, an incentive structure for pro-poor development and a view of 'development' in themselves.  How  do (do they?) global agreements and conventions change poor people's lives? The evidence isn't really in yet.

But even though the evidence isn't in, one thing is clear - by 2015, the goals won't be fully met. Many advocates prefer not to talk about it - they want the next 5 years to be a 'big push' by donor countries to get those goals met. Andy argues - and I agree with him here - that we need to look beyond these the next 5 years and start talking about what we want to happen next. And in order for that conversation to be successful, we need to include poor people in the discussion - whose voices are what really matters in creating pro-poor sustainable development.