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On the Role of American Religious Communities
In Achieving the Millennium Development Goals:
A Consultation

The Church Center at the United Nations
New York, New York
June 8, 2005

MDGs in Focus Session One: Poverty, the Environment, and Goal 8

Speech given by John McArthur, Manager, UN Millennium Project & Associate Director, Earth Institute at Columbia University

Thank you very much. It is a tremendous pleasure to be here with you today. This is a very powerful group representing many very powerful voices and constituencies from across this country, and, I understand, from around the world. So this is a wonderful opportunity, I hope, for us all to discuss some of the practical things that need to be done to address extreme poverty, and ways in which we can all work to help make sure those things are done.

Let me start by saying that right now we are living in the middle of what I believe to be a very important time for the world. And when I say “right now” I don’t mean this decade; I don’t mean this generation. I mean this week; I mean next week; I mean even tomorrow, today, yesterday… We are in the midst of a truly critical time in a critical month in a critical year. It could actually be the opportunity of a generation to achieve a breakthrough on the issues of extreme poverty around the world. The moment isn’t coming soon, it’s happening now.

Much of the current global drama has been building up for a long time. Yesterday’s meeting between Prime Minister Blair and President Bush was the lead issue on the nightly news around the world. The background discussions leading up to that meeting have been happening for years. Over the next few weeks we will see discussions culminate at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, hosted by Prime Minister Blair, and then at the September World Summit, which is scheduled to be the largest ever gathering of world leaders. I have heard that of the 191 member states of the United Nations, more than 170 government leaders are now scheduled to attend. Until now, the largest gathering of world leaders had 151 government representatives, so this gives a sense of the import of the moment.

But what moment? What are we actually talking about?

Let me share the view from where I stand, and sit, and email, and talk. This is the view from the UN Millennium Project, an initiative in which several people in the room have been closely involved - including Don Melnick who is, of course, the co-Chair of the Task Force on Environmental Sustainability and a true leader in the world of environmental sustainability for the MDGs.

Today I would like to talk a little bit about the basic diagnosis that the Millennium Project put forward. Then I’d like to talk about what that means for Goal 8, and what I think that means for us as we are talking here about how to achieve Goal 8.

People often ask me -- media professionals and otherwise -- are you optimistic about the MDGs or are you pessimistic? I always say I am neither; I am just thinking about what needs to be done. If we don’t get up every day worrying about what needs to be done, and making sure that the next set of steps is happening, then I know success won’t happen. But I do believe that if we all work together with a shared vision, following through with practical steps, each of us every day, then we can achieve the MDGs because we actually know that it’s not that hard to do. Let me explain just a little bit more about what I mean by that.

The Millennium Project has stressed the need for policy actions to be grounded in a good diagnosis of the multiple paths of development that are happening around the world. What we have today is what I myself call, in very simplified terms, a three speed global economy.

In the first speed we have the rich world: that’s Western Europe, Japan, and North America, adding up to about one billion out of the six billion people in the world. This part of the world, living at roughly $25-35,000 per capita per year of national income, has seen its income grow steadily for many decades and, more profoundly, since the Industrial Revolution roughly 200 years ago. Since then, the rich countries have enjoyed sustained, systematic real economic growth averaging roughly 2% per year. There are ups and downs and economic cycles, but in the long run there is a steady, constant path of progress for a lot of deep reasons and these bring ongoing long term improvements in human welfare. It’s what economists might call endogenous growth, when countries are rich enough to keep making themselves richer. It’s a fantastic process that wasn’t yet underway a few hundred years ago. It’s only a phenomenon of the past couple hundred years.

Then there is the second big group of countries, the second gear, which has quite a bit of variation and a lot of poverty. It’s what one might typically call the middle-income countries, but it also includes some of the fastest developing low-income countries. It includes about 4 billion people. This includes the enormous populations of India and China, countries that still have large amounts of extreme poverty but have also been experiencing remarkable progress in poverty reduction – especially over the past two decades as hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. This group also includes much of Latin America and East Asia, for instance, where poverty is still a major issue but the process of economic development has generally started – even if it has sometimes stalled. The common thread in this broad group of countries is that they have all started the process of long-term economic development and they have the capacity to tap in to the benefits in globalization. In many places the trends are exceptionally positive. Those are the places and people for whom globalization is really working.

Then we have the third speed in the global economy, which really has no speed at all. It includes roughly a billion people living below the extreme poverty standard of one dollar per day – the same number as are living in the rich world. The is primarily a story about Africa, although far from exclusively so. And for an enormous share of the people living in this third group, not only are they the poorest people on the planet, but they are not seeing progress either. This is a profoundly different situation than what we see in other countries where there is a great deal of poverty but a good rate of progress. These are the people – those stuck in third gear -- whom the Millennium Development Goals are meant to help.

These are the places that are actually too poor to afford the basic investments in health, education, infrastructure and energy that are needed to meet basic human needs. By energy, by the way, I mean something other than fuel wood that girls have to spend four hours a day collecting to cook with. These are the places ravaged by pandemic diseases like malaria, which is now basically tied with AIDS as the number one killer in the world, but has probably been the number one killer for much of human history. And it is important to remember that malaria overwhelmingly kills children, and not through any fault of their own, but through the lethal channel of a mosquito bite. These are the places that simply can’t afford to get out of the poverty trap they are stuck in.

So when we are talking about global partnership in Goal 8, yes, we need fair rules of the game for trade and the other issues that define the international playing field for all countries. But in my view what we are really talking about, at core, is a global partnership for the billion poorest people on that planet, those who have no hope of accessing the benefits of globalization without a little bit of outside help.

Consider the two thirds of Africans who are living in rural areas, nearly 500 million people. It’s in these rural areas where the most extreme poverty is generally found. People don’t have access to roads; they don’t have access to health care. They can’t even get fertilizers for their soil because it is so expensive to ship fertilizer when there are no roads. These areas are totally disconnected from the global economy. As just one example, last week I received the first ever email from a village in western Kenya where my colleagues are supporting community efforts to achieve the MDGs. The only reason the village happened to be able to send an email was because my colleagues have been working with them for a year and a half. The email was sent from the local school, and the children were astonished at the notion that someone around the world might write them back on the same day. Just the notion of connectivity is entirely new to the community, because it is so profoundly disconnected from the global economy.

These poorest places stuck in extreme poverty are the places where twenty thousand people are dying every day because they are too poor to stay alive. That’s eight to ten million a year dying of extreme poverty.

It is not a nice picture.

We’re letting it happen. All of us. I implicate myself as much as anyone else.

Now, the Millennium Project has not just been about providing a diagnosis. It is much more so about figuring out the practical actions needed to solve the problems of extreme poverty. To do so, the Project brought together about 300 leading experts and practitioners from around the world to serve on ten task forces that addressed specific issues of health, agriculture, nutrition, water, education, gender equality, trade, science and technology and so forth. This included leaders from civil society, science, academia, business, government, and the U.N. system. Don Melnick, the co-chair of the environmental task force who is here with us today, of course brought together a wide array of specialists with a wide array of experience in the environmental field. This was mirrored in other topics that the Project addressed.

The Millennium Project was commissioned by the UN Secretary-General, who realized that it is one thing to talk about the MDGs and another thing to achieve them. He wanted independent advice by leading practitioners, scientists and so on, to recommend an action plan on what can be done to achieve the Goals. The Project’s task forces spent a couple of years hashing it out, identifying and agreeing on practical steps that need to be put in to action.

They looked at real world specifics. For instance, when someone dies for lack of an anti-malarial pill, what would it take to actually get them the anti-malarial pill?

If a woman dies because she can’t get to emergency obstetrical care, what would it take to get her to emergency obstetrical care?

If children don’t get to school because they can’t afford it, what would it take to enable them to afford it, in practical terms?

When the Project looked at problems through this practical lens, we found, remarkably, with 300 of these leading experts from around the world, that we actually have a pretty good sense of what to do. We can always debate around the margin, as we always should, but we actually know how to prevent malaria and we know how to treat it. We know what emergency obstetrical care looks like. We know how to implement subsidies for girls to help get them into school. We know how to manage school meal programs. We know how to triple agricultural productivity in denuded soils in Africa. We know how to set up treatment programs and shelters for women who have been victims of violence, domestic or otherwise. These things have been done. They are not mysteries; they are practical.

The problem, fundamentally, is that the people in the poorest parts of the world -- the billion people under a dollar a day -- can’t afford even these simple, inexpensive and practical measures, even in the best governed places. As an aside, there are some places that are extremely poor because they are miserably governed, and I want to be clear that I am not defending miserable governance. But there are many heroic democracies in places like Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, and Tanzania, where annual income is maybe $300 per capita, or roughly 80 cents per day. And a huge amount of that is not even real income, since much of what is called income such countries is actually a calculation based on the imputed value of the agricultural products that farmers produce. There’s incredibly little cash circulating, often pretty much none, and people simply don’t have any money to afford basic investments in health, education, infrastructure, and so on.

So Goal 8, to me, is about helping to support those practical investments and practical measures so that if a country like Tanzania wants to provide universal access to health care they can do so, just as it has done in the past few years with universal access to education. In an amazing success, the country got millions of extra children in school once they were able to abolish user fees for primary education. The user fees were very inexpensive, typically less than ten dollars per year. But six or eight dollars a year was high enough to keep about two million children from being able to attend school – which underscores just how extreme the poverty is. Today President Mkapa says, “You have seen me do it for education, now I want to do it for health.” The problem is that health is much more expensive. It costs about $8-10 per capita to provide basic education. But in a country with rampant AIDS, it costs about $35-40 per capita for a basic health system. And while countries like the United States can afford public health expenditures of roughly $2,500 per capita per person on health care, Tanzania is only able to spend about $7 per capita of the $35–40 needed to maintain a minimally functioning health system.

The UN Millennium Project found that even though these points and practical solutions are known, they are not implemented at the scale required to make a real impact for the billion poorest people in the world. So we decided to figure out what needs to be done in very practical terms. We adopted the scale of needs as the guiding principle -- not feelings, not existing budgets, but start with the needs and work from there. The Millennium Development Goals are the objective reference point for the needs. In other words, it’s about taking those goals seriously.

For example, if we wanted to achieve a two-thirds reduction in child mortality in Uganda by 2015, what would that actually mean if we were to plan for it? If we take a hard headed, business-like approach and our jobs and lives depended on making sure this goal is achieved, what would we do? We took this approach in thinking through the relevant issues for a few countries. We asked: if you look at the different Millennium Development Goals and actually treat them as real, operational targets -- measurable, quantifiable, auditable targets -- what would you need to do? What’s the package of services that would be needed? And in doing so we crafted an approach that we call “MDG needs assessments” – which means assessing the needs and then mapping out what it looks like to scale up these basic, simple, known approaches to meet those needs. Just to be clear, I am not talking about waving a wand to make problems disappear; I am talking about practical things like anti-malarial drugs, textbooks, classrooms, teacher salaries, doctor salaries.

We spent a couple of years on this topic. We took a bottom-up approach, starting at the ground level, and worked our way up, looking at investment priorities and financing requirements. We wanted to figure out how much it would cost for a country to achieve the Goals, how much of that the poor countries themselves could afford, and how much in turn the world community would need to support beyond that. Through this process, we figured out that the MDGs are utterly affordable, but that the world needs much more official development assistance to back the poorest countries’ practical plans to meet their needs.

Today official development assistance amounts to approximately 0.25% of the rich world’s gross national product. That works out to about $70 billion a year. But if we want to achieve the Millennium Development Goals then that $70 billion a year needs to double right away. Then it needs to scale up further over the coming ten years as delivery programs build in developing countries. Total assistance would need to roughly triple in dollar value over the coming decade.

This would mark a major increase in development assistance, but fortunately – and crucially – it is all affordable within the long-standing international foreign aid target of 0.7 percent national income. This is a target that has been around for thirty-five years since it was first adopted internationally. It was most recently adopted by all governments as part of the 2002 Monterrey Consensus, where it was agreed that all countries which have not done so will make concrete efforts towards meeting the 0.7 target.

Fulfilling the 0.7 commitment would provide enough resources to finance the achievement of the MDGs, to halve extreme poverty within a decade. However, if countries don’t fulfill the commitment, then it will actually be impossible to afford the nurses, doctors, teachers, water pumps, basic anti-malarial pills and all the other practical things that are required in this effort. So meeting the 0.7 commitment is an absolutely essential piece of the MDG puzzle.

Five countries have already met the 0.7 target and eleven others have recently set timetables for doing so. So now sixteen of twenty-two official donor countries have either met or signed on to reach the 0.7 target by 2015. The six that have not done so are Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States. It’s a major piece of global progress that a majority of the world’s rich countries have agreed to this and to doing their fair share for the MDGs.

Now, I want to be clear about a couple of things that I have said. The 0.7 target is not about handouts. Nor is it about emergency relief, although that remains important and is part of the 0.7. Rather, it is about real investments in education, health, infrastructure, environmental sustainability. It is about providing the real things that will help the poorest places escape from the need for development assistance over the long term. If given an adequate boost in assistance now, some of the poorest countries could graduate from the need for aid over the coming decade. Poorer countries could graduate from aid over two decades. But they will not graduate without a boost of external support, because they are simply too poor, for many deep reasons, to make the basic investments required to get out of poverty.

Importantly, we are not talking about giving money to the most corrupt governments either. We are not talking about giving it to countries in the middle of corrosive civil wars, although there are things that can and should be done to help countries that are stuck in those situations. What we are talking about here is helping countries that are showing that they can and want to do real things, and that they are willing to step up to the plate with their side of the bargain. But now it is our turn to step up with ours.

I call this “taking Goal 8 to the developing country level.” While it is of interest and importance to me whether the Netherlands is contributing 0.71 percent or 0.73 percent of its national income to development assistance, ultimately I care much more about whether Tanzania is getting what it needs to put its children in school or to build its health clinics, and so on. And if we take this needs-based approach to the Millennium Development Goals, placing each country’s needs at the center of our strategy, giving the full 0.7 percent and doing our part to audit, to monitor, and to make certain the resources are going to the right place, I believe we will achieve success. That’s what Goal 8 is about to me.

I want to say a quick word about debt relief and trade because those topics are on the global political agenda today and they are central components of Goal 8. Debt relief needs to be understood as one piece of the much broader question of development assistance. For instance, for the United States to provide 0.7 percent of its national income would require jumping from the present level of about $18 billion to roughly $80 billion a year in development assistance. That’s the implication. Debt relief for the poorest countries will not make up this difference. Currently debt service payments by the low income countries are about four billion a year, depending on how you calculate it, and the current discussions of debt relief concern cutting about one or two billion dollars per year of payments. While providing this relief is very important, doing so will not provide developing countries with anything approaching the magnitude of resources that they require to achieve the MDGs. So as we hear about these important questions of debt cancellation – and I am delighted that there is political agreement among creditor countries to resolve them – we need to keep in mind that this is just one piece of the much bigger question of development assistance.

What does this mean for us in this room?

If you are from one of those six countries that hasn’t yet signed on to a timetable to reach the 0.7 target then there is a lot of community mobilization to be done to activate and energize what seems to me to be a potentially broad base of public support. In the United States, a House resolution was recently put forward in support of the Millennium Development Goals. This was the first time that there has ever been a Millennium Development Goal resolution in Congress. Relevant legislation is also being discussed on the Senate side, in a very bi-partisan way. I think we will probably be seeing much more legislation along these lines. So it is vital to inform people of the relevant issues across the country, because members of Congress listen when an issue matters back home. And keep in mind that if we do not get this breakthrough now, we can’t just say “Maybe next year…” because we are not going to have the same political spotlight next year. And the clock is ticking away as we approach the 2015 deadline for meeting the Millennium Development Goals.

There is an incredible amount of important work to be done. There is growing talk of possibly doubling aid to Africa -- that’s an extra $25 billion a year. So the President’s recent announcement of a $674 million emergency program for the Horn of Africa needs to be understood as an important emergency program but distinct from Africa’s immediate need for a $25 billion annual increase in aid. We have to stay focused on the real scale of need if we are going to help address support the billion poorest people in a meaningful way en route to the MDGs.

Finally, there are many immediately actionable things that your constituencies, your memberships, your communities, can help to launch. Rotary International is an amazing example of what non-governmental organizations can achieve. Its efforts have been instrumental to eradicating polio from the world. They are now on their last country and it is an extraordinary success. We are seeing other organizations that want to take on the distribution of long lasting bed nets to fight malaria. We have maybe 8% bed-net coverage in Africa right now, but there is absolutely no reason why we couldn’t have 100% coverage within a few years. Some religious groups want to take on the challenge of working to eliminate school fees for children around the world.

There are many practical measures like this that organizations could take on to achieve what we call “quick wins,” things that make major development contributions but don’t need ten years to scale up. These are actions that could very quickly save and improve tens of millions of lives. So we at the Millennium Project would be delighted if any of you want to undertake specific initiatives of this kind and we would be excited to talk and work with you to help figure out best ways to proceed.

Let me conclude with one last comment. This effort for the MDGs needs to be non-partisan, bi-partisan, with all hands on deck. The Goals represent an enormous opportunity for success, but they will also require an enormous group effort with all of us working together. That’s my approach coming into it and I hope that it can be ours together as we all do our part in working towards the achievement of the MDGs.

Thank you very much.