Checking in With the MDG's

2012 may be looming large in the box office, but for those involved in development it's 2015 that looms as a vicious specter on the horizon.
2015 is the deadline for countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goals or simply, the MDG's.

Established in September of 2000 The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight international development goals, with 21 targets and a series of measurable indicators for each target, that the 192 member states of the United Nations and some 20-odd international organizations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015.

They include:

1. The eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.


2. The implementation of universal primary education for girls and boys.


3. The promotion of gender equality and women empowerment.


4. Reduced child mortality.


5. Improved maternal health.


6. The reduction in the spread of and deaths related to HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases.


7. Insurance of environmental sustainability, which includes achieving by 2010 a significant reduction in the rate of global biodiversity loss.


8. Development of a global partnership for development.

Next year in 2010, the 2/3rds point in the timeline, there will be a large meeting to ascertain how well countries have moved towards reaching these goals. For most countries there will be few if any measurable gains. The indicator that I've had the most direct experience, #7: Ensuring environmental sustainability, with the specific target of achieving by 2010 a significant reduction in the rate of global biodiversity loss, appears, in the pseudo cryptic language often common in Economics, to be suffering from negative progress. The rate of global biodiversity loss has not been reduced. In fact, it has increased. It is a rate that continues to grow as we ride the runaway train known as climate change and everything from the polar bears to the maple tree suffer from the warming climate.

While it's easy to see and understand how we have not achieved environmental sustainability, that we should be so far off the mark from virtually all of the MDG's beggars the question, why create such targets at all? The targets seem still more bizarre when one considers that almost no one but the most idealistic, naive, or both within development circles seems to believe that the targets were ever in anyway achievable on a large scale. When talking about the MDG's phrases such as "doomed to fail" often pepper the conversation.

On the one hand, setting bold but potentially achievable targets act as a necessary catalyst to bring about social changes that were previously thought impossible. Examples of this are prevalent in social movements, from Gandhi's in India, to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, to the revolutionary movements in Central and Latin America that wrested control away from military dictatorships and into the hands of the people.

On the other hand, however, the MDG's are not as clearly defined as the aforementioned social movements. They are goals that bear a veneer of realism and achievability but do nothing to touch the underlying reasons why kids don't go to school, why maternal health is so bad, why the environment is collapsing. In other words the issues encapsulated within the Millennium Development Goals are not the problem. They are merely externalities, or side effects of a larger problem, much like a fever is the side effect of an infection. If you focus all of your attention on getting the fever down in the patient without focusing on why the patient has a fever to begin with, you leave room for the infection to ravage and kill the person even while you've successfully managed to get their body temperature to read normal.

The MDG's allow us a sense of progression without bringing about actual progress. Even worse, in doing so, they reinforce the idea that development is an intractable problem that people engage in because it's 'the right thing to do' but not out of any desire to bring about lasting, real, change.