New Zealand and Brazil are separated by more than 7,500 miles. The two countries seem to have little in common, apart from long white beaches and lush rainforests. But for decades both have struggled with similar developmental challenges, and that struggle has made Wellington and Rio de Janeiro important voices in the global debate on poverty.
Only sixty years ago, New Zealand basked in prosperity, enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world. Then, in the late 1980s and 90s, things started to cloud over. The country’s poverty rate jumped conspicuously, notably among its children. Researchers blamed disappearing jobs, changes to the tax system, and rising housing costs. Living conditions continued to slide backwards, and by 2001 it seemed possible that the small cluster of South Pacific islands could even fall off the OECD’s roster of prosperous nations. Helen Clark, the newly elected prime minister at the time and a former economics teacher, summed it up by saying that “New Zealand’s economic performance [had] not kept pace with that of other first world nations.”
Brazil, meanwhile, was moving in the opposite direction, along with much of the developing world. Its poverty rate had steadily declined through the 1980s and 90s, and the country was poised to cut extreme poverty nearly in half between 2003 and 2013.
Poverty has been part of the human experience from the very beginning. Revolutionary technological advances in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, in areas from agriculture to healthcare, should have changed that. But they did not. In 1990, 42.3 percent of the world’s population in developing countries still lived in extreme poverty, meaning that 1.9 billion people around the planet subsisted on $1 a day or less, the average of the world’s poorest 10 to 20 countries, according to the World Bank.
In 1992, the UN organized Earth Summit. It was an international mega conference in Rio that set about drafting a new blueprint for human wellbeing and sustainable development. Earth Summit was followed in 2000 by Millennium Summit in New York, which articulated eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) designed to stimulate progress in reducing global poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and disease by 2015.
Since then, the world has halved extreme poverty, five years before the MDGs’ target date. By 2010 extreme poverty had dropped to 20.9 percent, or 1.2 billion people subsisting on $1.25 or less a day (the new threshold, adjusted for inflation, calculated by the World Bank in 2005). In other words, 700 million people around world had been lifted out of dire material deprivation in only 20 years, a remarkable achievement by any measure. The UN attributes this success to countries coming together as one to tackle a common problem, although it acknowledges that progress has been uneven across regions, with large areas in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia unlikely to meet the MDGs by 2015.
Today, as the world looks beyond 2015, the UN is asking member states to build on the lessons learned from working toward MDG targets. Member states, the UN says, now have to decide how to “invest in the unfinished work of the MDGs, and use them as a springboard into the future we want—a future free from poverty and built on human rights, equality, and sustainability.”
Rio once again took center stage as the UN began charting its post-2015 agenda. In 2012 it hosted what Ban Ki-Moon called “one of the most important conferences in the history of the United Nations.” World leaders from 192 countries, along with thousands of participants from the private sector, NGOs, and other major groups, gathered in Rio for the Rio+20 Earth Summit. Their purpose was to start a process of designing a new set of development goals to replace the MDGs after 2015. These new goals will guide efforts to drive down poverty rates, advance social equity, and ensure environmental protection over the next fifteen years to 2030.
Preparations for the Rio+20 placed a renewed emphasis on sustainable development. That is, development which, to use the landmark definition crafted by the Brundtland Commission in 1987, “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
What emerged from the Rio+20 gathering was a series of principles for formulating Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Participants agreed that the goals have to be “action-oriented, concise, and easy to communicate, limited in number, aspirational, global in nature, and universally applicable to all countries while taking into account different national realities, capacities, and levels of development and respecting national policies and priorities.”
Foremost on the SDG list is poverty reduction. The proposed target is informed by a simple question. If extreme poverty could be halved in the 20 years between 1990 and 2010, could it not be nearly eradicated in the 20 years between 2010 and 2030?
It is an ambitious target, to be sure. But ambitious action is what many are calling for, especially the world’s younger generations. At the Rio+20 opening plenary, seventeen-year-old Brittany Trilford, a student from Wellington, was invited to the podium before more than a hundred heads of state to voice the concerns of her generation.
“I stand here with fire in my heart.” Trilford said. “I’m confused and angry at the state of the world. We are here to solve the problems that we have caused as a collective, to ensure that we have a future.”
“Are you here to save face, or are you here to save us?” Trilford challenged. “You and your governments have promised to reduce poverty and sustain our environment. You have already promised to combat climate change, ensure clean water and food security. Multi-national corporations have already pledged to respect the environment, green their production, compensate for their pollution. These promises have been made and yet, still, our future is in danger.”
The Rio+20’s outcome was articulated in a document titled “The Future We Want.” It outlines the lessons learned from two decades of development experience, and provides an assessment of the progress and gaps in implementing the MDGs. The report expresses a common vision for the post-2015 agenda in these words: “We recognize that people are at the center of sustainable development and, in this regard, we strive for a world that is just, equitable and inclusive, and we commit to work together to promote sustained and inclusive economic growth, social development and environmental protection and thereby to benefit all.”
Following the Rio+20, the UN embarked on one of the broadest consultation processes in its history, involving all UN member states, the entire UN system, and experts from a cross-section of the scientific community, civil society, and business. National consultations were held in almost 100 countries, and more than 5 million people around the world responded to the UN’s online “MY World” survey.
Details of the individual goals had yet to be worked out, though. In January 2013 the UN established an Open Working Group (OWG) consisting of 30 countries from various regions. It was tasked with preparing a proposal for consideration during the 68th session of the General Assembly between September 2013 and September 2014.
The OWG presented its proposal last June. Seventeen goals and 169 targets were identified, covering a broad range of sustainable development issues, including ending poverty and hunger, improving health and education, making cities more sustainable, combating climate change, and protecting oceans and forests.
Some believe the goals are too vague to be practical, with unquantifiable targets that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to gauge progress toward achieving them.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said 17 goals may be too many and that the number should be trimmed to 10 or no more than 12. “I appreciate the work of the open working group, and how difficult it is to deal with competing demands, but frankly...there are too many to communicate effectively,” he said. “There’s a real danger they will end up sitting on a bookshelf, gathering dust.”
Sam Kutesa, president of the 69th General Assembly and former foreign minister of Uganda, said that the goals have to be broad, ambitious, and transformative. “We carry the expectations of millions and millions of people,” Kutesa said on the opening day of debate in September, “but there are many issues and challenges that require our attention and effort in this session.”
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued his Synthesis Report in December, titled “The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet.” It incorporates comments received from world leaders during the Generally Assembly, plus those from other consultations that have taken place. Intended to set the tone for intergovernmental discussions on the SDGs between now and September, it indicates “the possibility to maintain the 17 goals and rearrange them in a focused and concise manner that enables the necessary global awareness and implementation at the country level.”
Ultimately, discussions involving individual governments will shape the final goals. The final goals will be presented for affirmation during a special session of the General Assembly in September. Implementation is expected begin in 2016.
Helen Clark, who attended the 2000 Millennium Summit as New Zealand’s prime minister and now heads the UN Development Programme (UNDP), explains that while there are many SDGs, they are all closely linked. “Tackling poverty and creating economic opportunity,” for example, “goes hand in hand with protecting biodiversity,” Clark said at a biodiversity protection conference in South Korea last October. Leaders, she said, have “to see the links between the complex challenges we face and the solutions.”
Clark argues that these links demand a holistic approach. Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere (SDG1), for example, cannot be effectively addressed without promoting inclusive economic growth (SDG8), equitable education (SDG4), and gender equality (SDG5).
“We estimate that more than 75 percent of the population in developing countries are living in societies where income distribution is less equal now than it was in the 1990s,” Clark said in a speech to the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation in Sweden last November. “High levels of inequality make poverty reduction even harder to achieve.”
Funding availability will have the final say in shaping the SDG list. The subject will be taken up in July at the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, slated to take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Clark stresses, however, that although funding is a critical component, the “means of implementation” look beyond money.
“Compared to the MDGs, the new sustainable development agenda will…be much more about making good policy choices,” Clark said. “Nonetheless, the availability of official development assistance (ODA) is still very important for low-income countries in particular, and commitment to ODA at adequate levels is important for building trust in the post-2015 negotiations.”
The UN plans also to employ “softer” means. These include various programs to encourage local government participation and efforts to strengthen local institutional capacities by making them more efficient, open, and responsive to stakeholders. The UN is calling on civil society to become actively involved in monitoring and accountability, and to create an “enabling environment” by helping to introduce new supporting legislation in member countries. Cultural values will play a role in stimulating economic opportunity, and so too will private sector participation, which is expected to provide essential sources of investment, employment, and innovation.
No one thinks the SDGs will be easy to realize. The goals are sweeping and their implementation broad. While non-binding, they are intended to apply universally to all member states, both rich and poor. Clearly they are more complex, and for that reason more difficult to communicate, put into action, and monitor than the MDGs. But the world’s problems are complex. Perhaps such an ambitious, integrated approach—one that looks to the links between development, human rights, peace and security, and climate change—is what is needed to carry us forward.
Photo: Aerial view of Monrovia. Sub-Saharan Africa is urbanizing and growing rapidly. Making sure that growth benefits the many is a key challenge for African countries. UN Photo by Christopher Herwig.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's January/February 2015 print edition.
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Can the World End Extreme Poverty by 2030?
January 12, 2015
New Zealand and Brazil are separated by more than 7,500 miles. The two countries seem to have little in common, apart from long white beaches and lush rainforests. But for decades both have struggled with similar developmental challenges, and that struggle has made Wellington and Rio de Janeiro important voices in the global debate on poverty.
Only sixty years ago, New Zealand basked in prosperity, enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world. Then, in the late 1980s and 90s, things started to cloud over. The country’s poverty rate jumped conspicuously, notably among its children. Researchers blamed disappearing jobs, changes to the tax system, and rising housing costs. Living conditions continued to slide backwards, and by 2001 it seemed possible that the small cluster of South Pacific islands could even fall off the OECD’s roster of prosperous nations. Helen Clark, the newly elected prime minister at the time and a former economics teacher, summed it up by saying that “New Zealand’s economic performance [had] not kept pace with that of other first world nations.”
Brazil, meanwhile, was moving in the opposite direction, along with much of the developing world. Its poverty rate had steadily declined through the 1980s and 90s, and the country was poised to cut extreme poverty nearly in half between 2003 and 2013.
Poverty has been part of the human experience from the very beginning. Revolutionary technological advances in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, in areas from agriculture to healthcare, should have changed that. But they did not. In 1990, 42.3 percent of the world’s population in developing countries still lived in extreme poverty, meaning that 1.9 billion people around the planet subsisted on $1 a day or less, the average of the world’s poorest 10 to 20 countries, according to the World Bank.
In 1992, the UN organized Earth Summit. It was an international mega conference in Rio that set about drafting a new blueprint for human wellbeing and sustainable development. Earth Summit was followed in 2000 by Millennium Summit in New York, which articulated eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) designed to stimulate progress in reducing global poverty, hunger, illiteracy, and disease by 2015.
Since then, the world has halved extreme poverty, five years before the MDGs’ target date. By 2010 extreme poverty had dropped to 20.9 percent, or 1.2 billion people subsisting on $1.25 or less a day (the new threshold, adjusted for inflation, calculated by the World Bank in 2005). In other words, 700 million people around world had been lifted out of dire material deprivation in only 20 years, a remarkable achievement by any measure. The UN attributes this success to countries coming together as one to tackle a common problem, although it acknowledges that progress has been uneven across regions, with large areas in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia unlikely to meet the MDGs by 2015.
Today, as the world looks beyond 2015, the UN is asking member states to build on the lessons learned from working toward MDG targets. Member states, the UN says, now have to decide how to “invest in the unfinished work of the MDGs, and use them as a springboard into the future we want—a future free from poverty and built on human rights, equality, and sustainability.”
Rio once again took center stage as the UN began charting its post-2015 agenda. In 2012 it hosted what Ban Ki-Moon called “one of the most important conferences in the history of the United Nations.” World leaders from 192 countries, along with thousands of participants from the private sector, NGOs, and other major groups, gathered in Rio for the Rio+20 Earth Summit. Their purpose was to start a process of designing a new set of development goals to replace the MDGs after 2015. These new goals will guide efforts to drive down poverty rates, advance social equity, and ensure environmental protection over the next fifteen years to 2030.
Preparations for the Rio+20 placed a renewed emphasis on sustainable development. That is, development which, to use the landmark definition crafted by the Brundtland Commission in 1987, “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
What emerged from the Rio+20 gathering was a series of principles for formulating Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Participants agreed that the goals have to be “action-oriented, concise, and easy to communicate, limited in number, aspirational, global in nature, and universally applicable to all countries while taking into account different national realities, capacities, and levels of development and respecting national policies and priorities.”
Foremost on the SDG list is poverty reduction. The proposed target is informed by a simple question. If extreme poverty could be halved in the 20 years between 1990 and 2010, could it not be nearly eradicated in the 20 years between 2010 and 2030?
It is an ambitious target, to be sure. But ambitious action is what many are calling for, especially the world’s younger generations. At the Rio+20 opening plenary, seventeen-year-old Brittany Trilford, a student from Wellington, was invited to the podium before more than a hundred heads of state to voice the concerns of her generation.
“I stand here with fire in my heart.” Trilford said. “I’m confused and angry at the state of the world. We are here to solve the problems that we have caused as a collective, to ensure that we have a future.”
“Are you here to save face, or are you here to save us?” Trilford challenged. “You and your governments have promised to reduce poverty and sustain our environment. You have already promised to combat climate change, ensure clean water and food security. Multi-national corporations have already pledged to respect the environment, green their production, compensate for their pollution. These promises have been made and yet, still, our future is in danger.”
The Rio+20’s outcome was articulated in a document titled “The Future We Want.” It outlines the lessons learned from two decades of development experience, and provides an assessment of the progress and gaps in implementing the MDGs. The report expresses a common vision for the post-2015 agenda in these words: “We recognize that people are at the center of sustainable development and, in this regard, we strive for a world that is just, equitable and inclusive, and we commit to work together to promote sustained and inclusive economic growth, social development and environmental protection and thereby to benefit all.”
Following the Rio+20, the UN embarked on one of the broadest consultation processes in its history, involving all UN member states, the entire UN system, and experts from a cross-section of the scientific community, civil society, and business. National consultations were held in almost 100 countries, and more than 5 million people around the world responded to the UN’s online “MY World” survey.
Details of the individual goals had yet to be worked out, though. In January 2013 the UN established an Open Working Group (OWG) consisting of 30 countries from various regions. It was tasked with preparing a proposal for consideration during the 68th session of the General Assembly between September 2013 and September 2014.
The OWG presented its proposal last June. Seventeen goals and 169 targets were identified, covering a broad range of sustainable development issues, including ending poverty and hunger, improving health and education, making cities more sustainable, combating climate change, and protecting oceans and forests.
Some believe the goals are too vague to be practical, with unquantifiable targets that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to gauge progress toward achieving them.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said 17 goals may be too many and that the number should be trimmed to 10 or no more than 12. “I appreciate the work of the open working group, and how difficult it is to deal with competing demands, but frankly...there are too many to communicate effectively,” he said. “There’s a real danger they will end up sitting on a bookshelf, gathering dust.”
Sam Kutesa, president of the 69th General Assembly and former foreign minister of Uganda, said that the goals have to be broad, ambitious, and transformative. “We carry the expectations of millions and millions of people,” Kutesa said on the opening day of debate in September, “but there are many issues and challenges that require our attention and effort in this session.”
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued his Synthesis Report in December, titled “The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet.” It incorporates comments received from world leaders during the Generally Assembly, plus those from other consultations that have taken place. Intended to set the tone for intergovernmental discussions on the SDGs between now and September, it indicates “the possibility to maintain the 17 goals and rearrange them in a focused and concise manner that enables the necessary global awareness and implementation at the country level.”
Ultimately, discussions involving individual governments will shape the final goals. The final goals will be presented for affirmation during a special session of the General Assembly in September. Implementation is expected begin in 2016.
Helen Clark, who attended the 2000 Millennium Summit as New Zealand’s prime minister and now heads the UN Development Programme (UNDP), explains that while there are many SDGs, they are all closely linked. “Tackling poverty and creating economic opportunity,” for example, “goes hand in hand with protecting biodiversity,” Clark said at a biodiversity protection conference in South Korea last October. Leaders, she said, have “to see the links between the complex challenges we face and the solutions.”
Clark argues that these links demand a holistic approach. Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere (SDG1), for example, cannot be effectively addressed without promoting inclusive economic growth (SDG8), equitable education (SDG4), and gender equality (SDG5).
“We estimate that more than 75 percent of the population in developing countries are living in societies where income distribution is less equal now than it was in the 1990s,” Clark said in a speech to the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation in Sweden last November. “High levels of inequality make poverty reduction even harder to achieve.”
Funding availability will have the final say in shaping the SDG list. The subject will be taken up in July at the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, slated to take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Clark stresses, however, that although funding is a critical component, the “means of implementation” look beyond money.
“Compared to the MDGs, the new sustainable development agenda will…be much more about making good policy choices,” Clark said. “Nonetheless, the availability of official development assistance (ODA) is still very important for low-income countries in particular, and commitment to ODA at adequate levels is important for building trust in the post-2015 negotiations.”
The UN plans also to employ “softer” means. These include various programs to encourage local government participation and efforts to strengthen local institutional capacities by making them more efficient, open, and responsive to stakeholders. The UN is calling on civil society to become actively involved in monitoring and accountability, and to create an “enabling environment” by helping to introduce new supporting legislation in member countries. Cultural values will play a role in stimulating economic opportunity, and so too will private sector participation, which is expected to provide essential sources of investment, employment, and innovation.
No one thinks the SDGs will be easy to realize. The goals are sweeping and their implementation broad. While non-binding, they are intended to apply universally to all member states, both rich and poor. Clearly they are more complex, and for that reason more difficult to communicate, put into action, and monitor than the MDGs. But the world’s problems are complex. Perhaps such an ambitious, integrated approach—one that looks to the links between development, human rights, peace and security, and climate change—is what is needed to carry us forward.
Photo: Aerial view of Monrovia. Sub-Saharan Africa is urbanizing and growing rapidly. Making sure that growth benefits the many is a key challenge for African countries. UN Photo by Christopher Herwig.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's January/February 2015 print edition.
