Global partnership for achieving MDGs
UN’s report Strengthening the Global Partnership for Development in a Time of Crisis highlights the need for cooperation among key stakeholders for accelerating progress on the Millennium Development Goals. It recommends public-private partnerships for advancing economic and environmentally sustainable growth.
Publisher: United Nations, 2009
Global poverty-fighting commitments are more important than ever in a world facing economic, food and climate crises.
Although development assistance rose to record levels in 2008, donors are falling short by $35 billion per year on the 2005 pledge on annual aid flows made by the Group of Eight in Gleneagles, and by $20 billion a year on aid to Africa, according to UN estimates.
The report written by the Secretary-General’s MDG Gap Task Force, which brings together more than 20 UN agencies, the IMF, the World Bank, WTO and the OECD, to track progress on the development partnership called for in the eighth Millennium Development Goal.
It highlights a ‘coverage gap’ in Official development assistance (ODA) distribution, as most of the increase in ODA since 2000 has been limited to a handful of post-conflict countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan. In contrast, many of the poorest nations in Africa have seen very little increase in aid. Developing countries have been hurt by the collapse in trade finance since the onset of the financial crisis, tallied at a falloff of somewhere between $100 and $300 billion.
Even after the success of two major debt relief initiatives, high prices for imported fuel and food combined with weak demand for export commodities have left many developing countries with difficulties in paying their external debts.
The UN Report finds that just as the purchasing power of the poor is under threat, the cost of many essential medicines is rising. The digital divide between the prosperous and the poor remains wide, both among and within countries.
Fixed broadband Internet service remains prohibitively expensive in the developing world, where people pay 10 times more than in industrialized countries.
The recommendations are public-private partnerships to improve access to essential medicines, mobile cellular telephony and Internet service.
A major theme emerging from the UN study is that implementation of the full range of global commitments can effectively advance economically and environmentally sustainable growth —growth that mitigates climate change while addressing the political, economic and public health deficits associated with extreme poverty.
