Membership

Forum 2002: Address as Delivered by
MARK MALLOCH BROWN
Administrator, United Nations Development Programme
to Interaction Conference

Washington D.C.
June 3, 2002

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, friends:

Bill Keller, writing in Saturday's New York Times declared something is different. After years in which conservatives dismissed the case for development because foreign aid "was money down a rat hole", and many of us clung to an entitlement view of aid: the poor deserve it however bad their government. Now, asks Keller, are we at one of those seminal public policy moments when conservatives recognize that the case for doing something is too powerful to go on hiding behind past failures, but that those same past failures require the liberal side of the argument to take a much tougher approach to performance and results. Are we then at one of those moments - an international equivalent of President Clinton and the Republican Governors' welfare reform moment when a new consensus, new action and new results follow.

Today, I want to argue that we can be. The argument starts with the continuing policy ripples from the tragedy of September 11.

From politics to public health, from migration to narcotics, from crime and, of course, to terrorism, the world has come to realize that the agenda of problems that can no longer be contained or managed within the boundaries of the single nation state, however powerful, is growing steadily.

As many have argued, there are not always direct links between these matters and global poverty. The terrorist pilots of September 11 were, as far as we know, disaffected sons of the middle class. But from Afghanistan to Sierra Leone we have also now seen clearly how - left unaddressed - the alienation, frustration and despair poverty breeds, the damaging lack of faith in political institutions it fuels, the spread of deadly diseases and environmental degradation it exacerbates, and the devastating impact on human dignity it exacts, leaves us all more vulnerable.

In short, after decades of neglect characterized by growing public disaffection and disinterest in the plight of the world's poor and a widespread sense of disillusionment in many quarters with the whole idea of development, the issue of how to help poor countries become richer, more stable and more democratic is firmly back on the global agenda.

Here in Washington that commitment has already found tangible form in President Bush's and the Congress' leadership in supporting the Global HIV/AIDS fund before September and his announcement since of a 50% increase in the US aid budget, to be spent through a new Millennium Challenge Account.
More broadly, from last year's agreement to launch a new "development round" of trade talks at Doha to the UN Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey earlier this year and extending on to the forthcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg later this year - marking the 10th anniversary of the historic Rio Earth Summit - leaders from both developed and developing countries have been starting to map out a Global Deal aimed at matching these new commitments with resources and action.

It is a political bargain being built around a partnership of mutual self-interest between the countries of North and South under which sustained political and economic reform by developing countries will be matched by direct support from the rich world in the form of the trade, aid and investment that is needed if they are to succeed.

But that brings me to the precarious part of this emerging global development agenda - and why the strong headwind now starting to fill our sails could still blow us all off course.

While we have heard many promises of support we have seen little yet in terms of real action - and in some areas, such as trade, we have actually seen some very worrying steps backward in terms of commitment to open markets to poor countries in agriculture and other areas. The recent Farm Bill the President signed into law has quite simply undone his generosity on aid.

In short, developing countries, remembering past promises that were never met and all too well aware that aid has been on a steady downward trajectory over the past decade -particularly to the poorest countries - remain sceptical that the promised resources will be raised to support the new rhetoric. Africa's per capita aid levels have been almost halved over the last 10 years despite more political and economic reform than ever before; competitive elections in 42 out of 48 sub-Sahara countries.

Despite the new pledges - with the Europeans adding $7b a year to their higher base, together with the US's $5b - the effort could still break down because of donor caution, poor country suspicion, public indifference and ultimately because these new pledges, generous though they are amount to one small part of what it is going to take to halve poverty by 2015.

The Millennium Development Goals: An Agenda for Action

Hence our challenge: we have a foot in the door but now we must push through it. Mary McClymont and Interaction, with the campaign for doubling the 150 Account have already demonstrated the advocacy power of those of you in this room when it is well aimed.

So the question we now face is how can we re-engage donor Governments and other partners around the benefits of concerted, effective interventions in areas from health to education that can pay huge global dividends in welfare and security? And how can we go beyond aid to tackle trade, debt, investment and R&D for developing countries on a scale that will make a difference. And lastly, how can we can we reorient priorities in those developing countries where national policy is still too often insufficiently focused around such issues of poverty, health, and the environment?

A doubling of ODA or more ambitiously the 0.7% of GDP is on our community's mind. Yet like this Administration, I am wary of abstract goals that identify an ideal, or moral, level of spending without first costing the actions. Nor do I think that calculating an external financing gap without focusing first on domestic economic growth and the contribution it must make is neither smart economics nor smart aid politics.

Yet donors must ready themselves for a quantum jump in what they should fund. They have not shaken off the mental habits of aid's cheap decades. Two weeks ago, Uganda almost lost $3m in Norwegian grant money to its health sector because it was allegedly not macroeconomically sustainable. Donors and their international institutions still look dubiously at recurrent costs. Yet, what is health delivery in a poor country beyond the recurrent costs of doctors, nurses and drugs - not much. From our own calculations, a country like Malawi will, even with good domestic growth, need support to its recurrent health costs for 25 years. Africa's chronic development problems are not one year fixes and donor thinking must make the jump.

I strongly believe the eight Millennium Development Goals that were endorsed by 189 countries at the historic United Nations Millennium Summit nearly two years ago provide a spring board. Drawn from the summits of the 1990s, they enjoy unique global authority. They are not the donor's instrument, but have global ownership.

Built around timebound targets that have universal political support, the MDGs can serve as both a mobilising tool and an accountability tool for both developing and donor countries. For Africa's latest odd couple, they offer Secretary O'Neill accountability and the measurement of results from drinking water to school enrolment. For Bono, they offer the peg and the benchmark to campaign for the commitment and resources to meet the real scale of the needs.

If we can take Secretary O'Neill and Bono as personifying the two halves of the tentative new policy consensus that I suggested at the start, what must the MDGs do to move them from travel to traction.

Because the power of the MDGs is political not programmatic. They are not a PRSP or an UNDAF or a bilateral aid agreement, rather they are a set of goals that the world has committed to; and we must now use our national political processes here and in developing countries to agitate and lobby for momentum we hope to give them. In this sense they provide the politicians coat-tails to a PRSP. Where there is political action and organization around poverty reduction a PRSP will be more poverty focused and more participatory.

Because MDGs are about changing the political conversations, unless democracies - that is politicians, parties and parliaments - can organize themselves around this millennium challenge - ending poverty as we know is in one lifetimes - neither they nor the systems they are part of can endure. Hence the real force of the MDGs: changing the dialogue from the non-essential political chatter in Nairobi, La Paz or Brussels or Washington to what matters: licking global poverty and offering everybody a decent chance in life. Almost as soon as the electoral forms of democracy is functioning in Africa, it is jeopardized by living standards no better than the late 1960s.

Yet there is no MDG for governance, or human rights or even refugees let alone the private sector or trade, but that is no contradiction: we know - as will be spelled out in a lot more detail in our upcoming global Human Development Report this year - that issues of democratic governance are critical to successful human development, and thus to any realistic prospect of helping developing countries achieve the Goals.

UNDP's fastest growing practice area is democratic governance. Last year we worked in now fewer than 145 countries on issues ranging from strengthening human rights, to helping parliaments improve budgetary oversight capacity, to running elections - such as the successful poll earlier this month that has helped bring a measure of peace and stability to war-torn Sierra Leone.

The MDGs are outcomes. You do not achieve the economic growth to sustain a halving of poverty without creating private sector and foreign trade; you do not sustain poverty reduction without ceding democratic rights and power to the poor; you do not get a country to the starting point of meeting the MDG goals if refugee post conflict and failed states crises are left unresolved. Development, and humanitarian action covers much more ground than these goals yet the goals remain as an agreed and universal way to measure outcomes - on the one hand leaving space for developing countries to seek their own path, not to be prescriptively micro-managed by international development officials while on the other knowing that international support will be contingent on progress towards these outcomes - that all heads of government north and south alike have solemnly signed up to.

So in that context it will not surprise you to hear that I strongly endorse InterAction's proposal to focus the Millennium Challenge Account resources on the MDGs, and use that to drive forward a broader process of ensuring rich and poor countries alike are committed to reform and held accountable for results. I worry that as the US develops its own bilateral criteria it will weaken and confuse the basic performance contract; allowing every donor its own selective favourites that rest too heavily on prescriptive judgment about what is thought to work in areas such as governance reform and too little on what we can actually count: numbers out of poverty, numbers enrolled in school.

On a global level, the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs is focusing on global progress towards meeting the MDGs, and annual assessments will be included in the Secretary-General's forthcoming reports on the Millennium Declaration, the first of which will be released this September.

At the national level, the primary tool will be new Millennium Development Goal Reports - country-led assessments, coordinated by UNDP working with UN system partners including the Bretton Woods Institutions, that will report annually on progress toward reaching each goal in each developing country. And will we hope become a vital input to national and international activities.

The idea derives in part from UNDP's very successful Human Development Reports.

There are over 360 of these now published and they represent an extraordinary spontaneous outgrowth of our better-known global flagship Human Development Reports. Countries and states within countries and communities within states, have all spontaneously gone ahead to benchmark themselves on the quality of life in their community vis-à-vis that of their neighbours.

In many cases, these have spurred extraordinary competitive public policy within big countries like India or Mexico, and between smaller countries and their neighbors all over the world- comparing how they are relatively doing on education, infant mortality, life expectancy, per capita income, and the other indicators that together make up our pioneering Human Development Index.

Our hope is to start to use the MDG Reports to do the same around these Goals. And wherever possible, we would like to work closely with civil society organizations that have real expertise in these areas and products, building on the experience of pioneers like Social Watch.

We have already prepared nine pilot studies and will roll out an additional 40 by the end of this year, with every developing country due to have prepared their first by 2004. This will require a major investment in national level statistical capacity. But by giving real time urgency to the race to achieve the goals it will pay for itself.

We have a couple of samples at the back - and bearing in mind these are still works in progress, I hope you will see what I mean. These are deliberately easy to read, accessible documents that seek to break down development challenges into issues - hunger, schools, childcare and so on - that everybody can understand.

So for donors, these reports will become a tool that can be used by a member of Congress or parliament wanting to check whether the aid dollars or euros they are being asked to vote for are have a real impact on what is happening on the ground.

And these reports will not be released into a vacuum. Because the third prong of our Strategy comprises the Millennium Research Project, a major new initiative being led by Jeffrey Sachs, the special advisor to the Secretary-General on MDGs.

Working with agencies from across the UN system, prominent academics from North and South, CSOs and others with real expertise, the Project will aim to flesh out just what is required in terms of policies, interventions and the kind of support will be needed -financial and otherwise- to help countries meet all the Goals.

The Project, which will be built around ten task forces looking at different dimensions of the MDG targets, will be formally launched next month.

Fourth, and finally, all this research, analysis and operational work will provide the raw materials to help fuel a series of advocacy and awareness-raising Millennium Campaigns across the world.

In developed countries these will be targeted on increasing support through aid, trade and debt relief, while in developing countries, the intention will be more to help build a national consensus on the urgent need for action on the MDGs through the kind of policies, programmes and resource allocations most likely to achieve them.

We are in the process of creating a dedicated Millennium Campaign Unit that will help coordinate these efforts. But we are also very clear that if this is to build and then maintain momentum over the next 13 years, than it simply cannot afford to be seen as a UN campaign.

Rather we want to build on the success of global campaigns like the debt relief and land mines movements - in which so many of you have been and remain involved - trying to generate momentum around the different MDGs at national and global level.

And this is the area where I am really looking for support and ideas from all of you. Because I am well aware when it comes to both reporting and campaigning, you all have much more experience, expertise and ideas than the UN- as well as the skills and experience needed to mobilize primary actors in governments and other policy-making bodies to act on their commitment to the MDGs.

Building on the activities from the work being launched by CARE and others to map out the direct contribution CSOs are making to achieve the Goals, to the advocacy role so many of you have already started to play in helping make the MDGs come alive, this has to be your campaign as much as ours.

Instead of trying to be a global campaign control room, therefore, the Millennium Campaign Unit will seek to act more as a net worker, message promoter, meeting point and partnership facilitator.

Using Millennium Project research, the MDG Reports, and other work, we want to help provide the ammunition to you, your partners, other groups like churches and religious organizations, to really drive this agenda forward at the country level all over the world.

Supporting Reform with Results

Let me close with some brief final observations: in this town, although not in this room, there is an instinct to go it alone with the new Millennium Challenge Account so as to not corrupt performance allocation with the old calculations of former colonial donors and so forth. Yet the evidence is that no bilateral gives aid objectively - as new research by OECD/DAC clearly shows - multilateral assistance has in recent years been more focused on priority social areas like basic education and healthcare that the MDGs seek to target and has been much more likely to be steered towards countries able to demonstrate good performance than bilateral support.

At another, it is because when we are talking about the kind of interventions that will need to be scaled up quickly to manage the kind of resources necessary to help meet the MDGs, only multilaterals such as the World Bank and regional Development Banks or UNDP, and its fellow UN agencies, that have the global reach and established infrastructure not only to ratchet up activities at country level rapidly and effectively but also to report on results in a fully transparent manner.

Finally, multilateral support is also critical to provide a safety net and support network for the countries that have yet to embark on successful reform, who are not likely to attract more funds and support under this Global MDG Deal; and whose citizens are thus at real risk of falling ever further behind rather than starting to catch up. I have warned against Darwinianism in aid - where we only support the good performers and let failed and failing states fall ever further behind. Ironically, Afghanistan, the cause for so much of the change of thinking in Washington would not have benefited from the Millennium Challenge Account or indeed the MDG global deal. Yet a development system that does not reach out with humanitarian aid and technical assistance and advice to encourage, scold and incentivise governments to get into a performance track where they can be rewarded with additional resources is half a system; also our criteria must not be so governance-focused that it is geography-blind. One of the lessons of the '90s is good reformers and donor favourites - Uganda or Bolivia for example - are not capturing the full benefits in higher growth and foreign investment because land-locked is land-locked. Twenty-four days to the port in Mombasa is a huge competitive disadvantage.

Given our core strengths - our UN character, our universal country presence, our global network for capacity development and policy support - I think these are key areas where UNDP can be particularly helpful, as can you the NGOs manning the case for the good, but geographically handicapped performer; providing the support to encourage change and avoid humanitarian tragedy to the bad performer.

In cases where it is impossible or inappropriate to work with Governments - as it was, for example, in Taliban led Afghanistan - we work directly with communities and civil society organizations. But the bottom line is that UNDP's help is never conditional - all over the world, we will be there, ready with support and advice for countries that may have terrible track records but are starting to take the first tentative steps towards real reform.

Because in the final analysis, if we are to meet the MDGs and confront the litany of challenges I outlined at the start, we have to target all developing countries, not just a few. And even as we help the good performers move ever faster up the ladders of results and performance, someone needs to be helping those left behind get their foot on the first rung.

But if we can do that - if we can build on the real momentum of the past year, and the exciting new partnerships emerging between the UN system, civil society, governments, and others that are now opening up around the Millennium Development Goals - then I think we have every chance of harnessing this new global commitment for change to build a safer and more prosperous world for everybody.

Thank You