millennium development goals Archives - Humanosphere

millennium development goals

An interactive map of how the international community plans its next attack on poverty |

The international community is in fevered talks aimed at trying to decide what to do to reduce poverty, inequity and injustice after 2015 – when we reach the finish line for the first set of such targeted goals known as the Millennium Development Goals.

Here, from World of Data is a visual, interactive description of the lingo:

: World of Data

It seems a bit odd that the word poverty is so small while inequity and injustice aren’t even included. Why is the word ‘guardian’ in there, I wonder? A reference to the news organization? Keep in mind, this is just a snapshot of one moment on social media (Google, Twitter) prompted by one discussion at Global Pulse.

FILED UNDER: Basics, millennium development goals

June 14, 2012 | 10:00 AM | By Tom Paulson |

METRICS MANIA

Rwandans fight poverty while others fight over the numbers |

Tom Paulson

Donald Ndahiro, team leader of Millennium Villages Project in Rwanda

Editor’s Note: This is the latest in an ongoing series, Metrics Mania, exploring the debates surrounding how to tell if aid and development projects are working. This is a look at one such project at the center of the debate.

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MAYANGE, RWANDA — Many miles south of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ in Kigali is the site of one of the worst massacres of the 1994 Rwandan genocide where the majority Hutu ethnic group sought to eliminate their rivals, the Tutsis.

As one local, Donald Ndahiro, told me during my visit here to the Bugasera District: “This was the place they used to send people to starve and die.”

Ndahiro said this was a terrible place before the genocide — a tsetse-fly infested, hostile land of the extremely poor. And it remained a terrible place after. Only a few years ago, people were still starving — and dying — here in one of Rwanda’s poorest regions. Disease, alcoholism and despair were rampant.

It’s not at all like that today. So what happened?

Tom Paulson

Coffee farming, Bugesera District

One explanation is that a number of aid projects — including the celebrated Millennium Villages and a lesser-known but large-scale health improvement project by the Seattle-based Glaser Progress Foundation — were launched here aimed at correcting decades of neglect and to see if targeted investments could rapidly improve quality of life. Also nearby is another Seattle project, a girl’s school called Gashora Academy.

A competing theory is that the progress here is largely due to Rwanda’s overall economic improvement in the past decade.

These two views provoke fierce argument over whether foreign aid works, or at least how to measure its effectiveness. Metrics mania. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Politics, Donald Ndahiro, Jeffrey Sachs, Josh Ruxin, millennium development goals, Millennium Villages, Rwanda

June 7, 2012 | 10:00 AM | By Tom Paulson |

METRICS MANIA

Q&A with Jeffrey Sachs: Why is everyone so mad at this guy? |

Tom Paulson

Jeffrey Sachs, outside Paramount Theatre on recent visit to Seattle

Well, maybe not everyone.

But the world-renowned economist and director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute certainly has his fair share of angry critics.

Jeffrey Sachs draws fire like few others within the aid and development community. Yet it’s also fair to say he has done as much as anyone to promote the fight against global poverty and injustice.

Before he became known as an anti-poverty warrior, Sachs advised countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe on transitioning to market economies, an experience which led him to a focus on international development in general.

He’s become a vocal advocate of the power we have to end extreme poverty and a critic of the indifference of the rich world to the plight of the poor — or of policy makers who don’t take up the cause.

Sachs is perhaps mostly closely associated with the initiative known as the Millennium Development Goals, an ambitious scheme launched by the United Nations and international community in 2000 that set out eight goals aimed at reducing extreme poverty and global inequity.

To both prove the value of and learn how best to achieve these goals, Sachs launched the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) — a 10-year project based in 14 communities across Africa, involving some 500,000 people given funding to make strategic improvements in certain aspects of health, infrastructure, education and business.

Millennium Villages

It’s an investment of tens of millions of dollars over ten years that tallies out at $120 per person per year – aimed at demonstrating that key changes in health, agriculture, water, roads, education and business development can lift communities out of poverty.

And it is Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project that seems to get people hopping mad.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Jeffrey Sachs, metrics, millennium development goals, Millennium Villages

May 9, 2012 | 10:36 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Will new, positive findings allow Jeffrey Sachs to stop shouting back at the critics? |

Columbia University

Jeff Sachs

The renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, now director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, seems to irritate people — which also seems to prompt his critics to engage in vitriolic attacks of his efforts to combat global poverty and inequity.

The debates centered around Sachs remind me of some of the people I’d meet as a boy attending church, those folks who would argue angrily, endlessly and insultingly over fundamental disagreements about how best to love thy neighbor.

Whatever one may think about Sachs’ methodology or personality, can’t we all at least agree he has done a lot to promote the causes of global health, social justice and equity? For one, Sachs helped craft the Millennium Development Goals — which, if imperfect, gave the world a strategy for improving global health, reducing poverty and improving the lives of the poor worldwide.

One of Sachs’ biggest projects today is known as the Millennium Villages Project. Not surprisingly, it has been pilloried by many aid experts who say there is no evidence the project does any good.

Well, according to The Guardian, there is now evidence of good from Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project:

Death rates among children under five at the Millennium Villages – set up in Africa to demonstrate what is possible if health, education, agriculture and other development needs are tackled simultaneously – have fallen by a third in three years compared with similar communities, according to the project’s first results.

Sachs, in characteristic form, explodes all over the media with these positive findings to announce a breakthrough in the Huffington Post and to suggest, for CNN, that these results show that we can finally achieve “the dream of health for all, even the poorest of the poor… (This) can become a reality because of recent breakthroughs in technology and health systems.”

A bit over the top, yes, but that’s just the way Jeff likes to talk. You need to keep in mind he started on his campaign against poverty and the diseases of poverty back in the days when, well, hardly anybody gave a damn. He had to shout. And he’s still shouting.

So now, finally, he has some data to back his claims up and can maybe stop shouting.

Or maybe not. As Nature News notes, the findings aren’t likely to stop the critics:

“The core of the problem is lack of transparency and careful, independent analysis,” says Michael Clemens, a migration and development researcher at the Center for Global Development, an independent research institution in Washington DC.

The aid blogger Roving Bandit notes that even if child mortality declined in the Millennium Villages, the project itself found no statistical impr0vements in poverty, nutrition, education or other child health indices.

So I guess, no, the answer appears to be the shouting is likely to continue.

FILED UNDER: Basics, child mortality, Jeffrey Sachs, millennium development goals, poverty

March 13, 2012 | 11:50 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Geena Davis in Seattle, calls for the ‘next women’s movement’ |

"Thelma & Louise" by MGM, Ridley Scott director

Actor and women’s advocate Geena Davis — Thelma in the 1991 hit ‘neo-feminist’ movie Thelma & Louise — was in Seattle Monday evening calling for a renewed women’s movement worldwide.

Women 3.0

“We’re due for a resurgence of the women’s movement,” Davis said to a packed room at Seattle Town Hall. Though the Seattle crowd was by far mostly women and girls, she spoke earlier in the day on the Microsoft campus in Redmond to a packed room of mostly men. The event was sponsored by Global Washington.

Davis, who was in town stumping for her philanthropy, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, spent a lot of time fielding questions and criticizing the way women are portrayed — and perceived — in Hollywood and throughout the media. But her concerns are much more global.

Davis repeatedly emphasized that many, if not all, of the international community’s goals (the Millennium Development Goals) for fighting poverty and improving the welfare of those living in the poorest parts of the world depend upon improving the circumstances of women and girls.

“We need to make people realize that these issues, of social justice and poverty, are women’s issues,” she said. “It’s a mistake to think there are ‘women’s issues’ over here and these other problems over there.”

Meryl Schenker, www.merylschenker.com

Geena Davis, with Chris Grumm, left, Andrea Taylor, center, at Seattle Town Hall

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Justice, Geena Davis, human rights, millennium development goals, women

March 6, 2012 | 11:08 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Global safe drinking water goal achieved |

Mike Urban, mikeurbanart.com

Borehole water supply, Nigeria

Amid all the dire reports that seem to indicate the world is going to heck in a handbasket, here’s some good news:

The United Nations children’s agency, otherwise known as UNICEF, reports that 89 percent of the world’s population now has access to safe drinking water. As the Washington Post said:

The water target was one of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to reduce global poverty that government leaders, nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations have been working to achieve, with varying success.

This is cause for celebration, The Guardian notes, yet this milestone should not deflect attention from the fact that many hundreds of millions more — nearly a billion people — still lack access to clean and safe drinking. And, as also noted by The Guardian, about 2.5 billion don’t have proper sanitation which puts them at risk of many diseases and of contaminating their local water resources.

It should be noted that much of the progress achieved over the past decade has been due to improved living conditions in China and India, and that many parts of the world are still in desperate need of safe water and sanitation. Reuters quotes the head of the UN:

“Some regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, are lagging behind,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in the report. “Many rural dwellers and the poor often miss out on improvements to drinking water and sanitation. Reducing these disparities must be a priority.”

FILED UNDER: Basics, Health, Justice, millennium development goals, sanitation, UNICEF, United Nations, water

October 14, 2011 | 9:14 AM | By Tom Paulson |

The curious case of the Millennium Villages: Arguing why we get better |

How many Americans know and/or care about the “Greatest Promise Ever Made” — the Millennium Development Goals?

I haven’t seen a survey, but I suspect the numbers are low. That’s unfortunate because most economists and foreign policy experts say that reducing global poverty and improving people’s lives makes the world a better, safer, healthier and more prosperous place for all of us.

That’s what the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aim to achieve by 2015. The MDGs represent the international communities’ basic yardstick for measuring whether things are getting better out there. Whether the MDGs represent the best way to measure things getting better is another issue. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Center for Global Development, Jeffrey Sachs, Kofi Annan, millennium development goals, Millennium Villages

September 23, 2011 | 7:27 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Progress against poverty: A video celebration of the evidence |

The U.S. Agency for International Development, once one of the most bureaucratic and boring agencies in the federal government, is doing a pretty lively, entertaining job of educating us about our work in the world.

Credit Raj Shah, the former Gates Foundation wunderkind who CNN recently profiled as the Young Gun Fixing USAID. Whether he can actually “fix” the agency remains to be seen. But they are doing a pretty good job on getting the word out about our nation’s efforts in aid and development.

Below is a compelling video USAID released during UN Week to celebrate the progress being made in the fight against global poverty, disease and inequity.

Created in partnership with Britain’s aid agency, DFID, the video is part of a campaign called the MDG Countdown. The idea is to draw attention to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (the international community’s eight poverty reduction targets set for 2015):