In the year 2000, the UN General assembly
adopted the Millennium Declaration, in which world leaders committed to
achieving a set of 8 goals by 2015. Since then, these Millennium Development
Goals, or MDGs, have become the latest buzzword at different levels of
the international development aid industry, and have spawned substantial
employment generation for what are now called "development practitioners".
The MDGs are certainly worthy and well-intentioned, stating goals that
no sane person could really object to. They are: to eradicate extreme
poverty and hunger; to achieve universal primary education; to promote
gender equality and empowerment of women; to reduce child mortality; to
improve maternal health; to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases;
to ensure environment sustainability; and to develop a global partnership
for development.
All this was supposed to happen through a combination of more international
aid and policy changes within developing countries. The trouble is that
the policies that were suggested typically involved more of the free-market-obsessed
deregulation that has already created employment stagnation and greater
income inequalities in most of the world. But while there have been several
critiques of the polcy orientation implicit in the entire exercise (for
example by Focus in the Global South) there has been relatively little
in terms of either assessments on the ground or presentation of the perceptions
of the people who are supposed to be benefited by it.
That is why a new report by ActionAid International, entitled "Whose
Freedom?" (published in September 2005) is quite an eye-opener. This
report is based on interviews with more than 350,000 people from 5,000
villages in 19 poor developing countries over the months of June, July
and ugust this year. It presents a stark and graphic picture of the continuing
hardship faced by ordinary people in these countries, more than 5 years
after the MDGs were first adopted. The countries are: Afghanistan, Nepal,
Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Senegal, Malawi,
Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Burundi, Brazil
and Guatemala.
The agrarian crisis afflicting most of the developing world is reflected
in the evidence especially from small and marginal farmers in the survey.
With small and marginal farmers unable to eke out a livelihood from their
plots, there was a widespread pattern to recourse to casual and insecure
wage labour to make ends meet. Yet there are simply not enough jobs to
meet this growing demand – people in 87 per cent of the villages reported
that work was not available regularly when needed, and in 50 per cent
of the villages paid work was available for only half the month the most.
This has affected food intake. Hunger deaths were reported from 24 per
cent of the villages, and people from 64 per cent of the villages said
they were forced to skip meals, either regularly or in particular seasons.
Public systems of social protection were found to be minimal: people in
47 per cent of the villages had no access to any public service in any
season. In fact only 21 per cent of the villages offered a public distribution
system for food. In periods of drought or shortage, only 15 per cent of
villages reported any form of drought relief, such as food for work, cash
or other transfers.
Aagainst this already depressing background, women apparently face increasing
discrimination and denial of rights. In nearly half of the villages, no
women owned any land, in villages where they did, they were recorded as
owning land in less than 30 per cent of cases, mostly, as co-owners with
men. Work availability and wages were found to be substantially lower
than for men. In 77 per cent of villages, there was no government support
for female-headed households, while there they did get some, coverage
was limited to less than 30 per cent of such households. All the villages
in all the countries reported a high incidence of violence against women.
Better education and health form an important part of the MDGs. But in
half of the villages, people said they were dissatisfied with the education
services, and parents from 56 per cent of villages reported that education
was not affordable at all, given the user fees and loss of children's
earnings. A shocking finding was that people from 71 per cent of the villages
reported that local children worked for wages instead of attending school.
Around 87 per cent of villages had girls of school-going age who had not
enrolled. The general discrimination faced by girls was reflected in the
fact that schools in 60 per cent of the villages did not toilets for girls.
Health services were even worse. 80 per cent of the people interviewed
said that health services were too costly for them to access. 77 per cent
of the villages did not have health centres, and in half the villages
people had to walk more than 3 kilometres to reach health posts. In any
case, even at these health posts, 76 of respondents reported that medicines
were not available. Access to clean drinking water was found to be limited,
with reports ranging from scant availability to drought-like conditions.
Clearly, the MDGs are failing. Almost all of the respondents to this survey
felt that over the past five years, they have either remained where they
were or are worse off in terms of access to food and basic services and
fulfilment of fundamental human rights.
While these results are shocking at one level, they are not entirely unexpected
for those who have been observing the working out of the mechanisms unleashed
by the processes of national and international deregulation and withdrawal
of governments from fulfilling their basic social responsibilities. Unfortunately,
while the official aid industry makes much of the MDGs, they still continue
to promote policies that will prevent their ever being achieved. Until
there is dramatic shift in the policies imposed by most multilateral institutions
and followed by governments, this sorry state of affairs will continue
and even deteriorate further.
Obviously policies of privatisation of public services must be discontinued,
and there has to be substantial increase in spending to provide public
services, including for nutrition, health, sanitation and education. Public
spending for agriculture has to be greatly enhanced, and employment generation
schemes must be given top priority. Most important of all, ordinary people
must be given greater voice in affecting the decisions hat affect their
conditions of life.