New York City is packed with people attending both the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) and UN Week where the focus is the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The following is a compilation of articles written about these meetings. This post will be updated regularly with the most recent articles at the top.
——-
MDGs for Women Largely Unmet – Council on Foreign Relations – “An MDG report released in June noted that when it comes to women, ‘progress has been sluggish on all fronts–from education to access to political decision-making.’”
——-
Are we underutilizing our best hope to achieve MDG4? – Karen Grepin’s Global Health Blog – “Does that mean that there is no hope left? Not necessarily – but it would require there to be a major acceleration in child mortality rates by getting highly effective interventions against the major killers of children in the developing world. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an intervention that already exists, that is likely to be effective at reducing a major fraction of an important disease, with say just a shot in the arm, that we are currently underutilizing, and that could potentially be rolled out tomorrow?”
MDGs and theories of change – Aid on the Edge – “The Millennium Development Goals have been succinctly described as ‘the world’s biggest promise’. The last few week has seen a veritable mountain of reports, papers, policy papers, blogs and tweets on the 10 year mark, all of which are in a slight spin about the imminent approach of 2015, the anticipated end-date of the MDGs. Despite the sheer volume of material and amassed intellect that has been focused on the critical issues, one important area appears to have been sadly neglected…”
Upping the Ante: a Report from the Clinton Global Initiative - Stanford Social Innovation Review – “Sure, there are the usual numbers of Hollywood celebrities and big-name philanthropists air-kissing each other near the elevators. But it’s almost as if everyone got a memo asking them to keep the big vision talk to a minimum, skip the grandstanding, and collaborate with each other to bridge the gap between all the talk about change and real impact.”
——-
everything new is old again – Texas in Africa – “I’ve been thinking for several days about how to sum up my experiences at UN/MDG Week, but, well, everything that needs to be said has pretty much already been covered… A few final thoughts:”
UN summit roundup: three development narratives – Owen Abroad – “Last week’s UN meetings in New York prompted a flurry of papers, speeches, documents, announcements and articles about development in general, and the Millennium Development Goals in particular. There seem to be three emerging development narratives which are not obviously completely compatible. I’ll summarize them here, and in a later post I’ll look at whether there they can be brought together into a coherent synthesis.”
——-
Transparency and the MDG summit - Aidinfo – “As the MDG Summit kicks off in New York, we’re thrilled to hear that transparency is emerging as a key theme.”
Gross National Happiness – Lifting the Poverty Curtain – “My highlight though was the speech from the Prime Minister of Bhutan. He called on the voluntary adoption of a ninth MDG: happiness. Bhutan has long rejected mainstream development paradigms, opting to meaure its country’s progress not by improvements in Gross National Product, but Growth National Happiness. Interestingly, the Bhutanese rightly point out that the MDG framework does nothing to tackle poverty and inequality in the developed world. Goals towards achieving happiness, they point out, would be equally relevant and valuable for the global north.”
——-
Africans Must Not Rely On the So-Called Millennium Goals – allAfrica.com – “Instead of falling for the rhetoric around the UN development goals, Cameron Duodu argues that Africa should gauge the true commitment of rich countries to ending poverty on the continent by looking to the past. In this area, the G8 has been sorely lacking, he says.”
What have we learned from all of this talk about Millennium Development Goals? – Engaging Internationally – “Last week in New York world leaders, NGO representatives, and a multitude of other stakeholders and interested parties met for a review of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In addition to the official MDG Summit numerous auxiliary meetings were held including the Clinton Global Initiative, Digital Media Lounge, and TedXChange. What did we learn (or reconfirm) from all of this talk?”
MDG summit keeps goals on the world agenda but disappoints many - Reuters Alertnet – “Big on rhetoric, thin on action. Failed to address root causes of poverty or deliver a big enough boost in aid funds. These are the common criticisms levelled at a U.N summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which concluded on Wednesday. But how fair are they?”
Clinton Global Initiative 2010: Things that made me go “hmmm…” – Wonderment Woman – “This year’s CGI kicked-off with “girl power.” Specifically, the need to educate them, protect them, respect them, prepare them and empower them. Among the ideas tossed around at this week’s do-gooder conclave that made me go ‘hmmm‘”
——-
Highlights from MDG Week – Wait… What? – “There was a lot of talk about Technology and Innovation, Women and Girls, and Public-Private Partnerships, and, well, a lot of talk in general according to some, but I am not going to go there…. My learning highlights for the week were in the area of m4D (mobiles for development) and ICT4D (information and communications technology for development)”
How Obama Was Brainwashed by the Microsoft Theory of Foreign Aid – The New Republic – “The problem is not with the analysis but rather with the president’s implicit claim that we know how to offer peoples and nations such a path. This, too, is an article of faith in the development world, as will be well know to anyone familiar with the ignorant if well-intended antics of a Bono or a Bob Geldof, or, for that matter of academics like Jeffrey Sachs, whose 2005 book, titled with Sach’s typical modesty, The End of Poverty, makes a negligible contribution to development theory but will be of riveting interest to future scholars of early twenty-first-century utopianism. The stark fact is that only if one fetishizes the idea of civil society as a kind of universal ideological solvent, and believes that, in tandem with scientific innovation, the road to our collective salvation is now open to us, can such optimism be justified.”
——-
How Throwing Snowballs Explains the Mobile Revolution (CGI2010) - Global Health Ideas – “Technology is not only being driven by consumers but from the global south. There is reverse innovation–where the global south is the test bed for innovation and the developed world is learning a great deal from. We’re seeing that the “global south does not just consume technology but can produce it,” says Ory Okolloh from Ushahidi.”
Three interesting trends in the traditional aid discussion – The Broker – “There were three interesting moments during this event, characterizing three trends that may emerge during and after this summit.”
The MDGs: Addressing the enabling environment through the ethical framework of human rights – The Broker – “The Millennium Development Goals have provided a forum for discussion on poverty and development at the international level. They have contributed to bringing the devastation of poverty and inequality to the forefront of the international arena. Yet they have failed to maintain a holistic human rights approach or to hold developing and developed countries to the same standards of rigorous evaluation in relationship to their commitments to those goals.”
Human rights: The post-2015 agenda? – The Broker – “This short piece intends to advance the provocative notion that not less, but more is required. By more, I mean, after 2015 it might be wise to go back to the international human rights framework.”
UN Week Notes: Friday – the Final Thoughts – Blood and Milk – “My final impressions of the MDG summit, the UNGA sessions I saw on the web, and the Clinton Global Initiative boiled down to three main things: optimism, self-interest, and the private sector.”
Notes on cook-stoves – On my way - “This post is not about best practices. It is from my memory of a cook-stoves programme I have seen from close quarters; about what can go wrong. Although the intervention had features that could have made it work, it faced numerous challenges that made field workers and communities weary and progress, slow.”
Workshop Season – Hand Relief International (spoof) – “I don’t know what season you’ve got going in your part of the world at the moment, but if you are in our business sector you are probably well aware that we are in the middle of Workshop Season – a cyclical occurrence completely unaffected by the complexity of hemispheres, climate zones or climate change.”
The Invisible Hand Axe – @laurenist – “We can’t let corporations drive international development to the point where the consumer’s choice is dictated by the corporation. Where only a Coca-Cola product is available and the people who just want clean water are out of luck. That Coca-Cola is already implementing just such a dastardly plan at a venue like the Clinton Global Initiative does not bode well for their respect for consumers’ choices, but it also doesn’t mean I’m giving up on this whole economic growth thing.”
Microfinance or Loan Sharks? Grameen Bank and SKS Fight it out – Forbes – “Profiting from the Poor? A Discussion on Microfinance IPOs. Vikram Akula, founder of SKS Microfinance, India’s biggest microfinance institute that is poised to become the largest in the world after its recent IPO (and has billionaire Vinod Khosla and Sequoia Capital as investors amongst others), slugs it out with his one time idol, Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize founder of Grameen Bank and the father of microfinance.”
Diary of a serial summit attendee – Aid Watch – “Clinton is creating more of a pulse closing his show, which I’m watching from the press pen since they couldn’t fit half the press people into the mobbed closing session. Looking out at the audience (Oh my God that’s Mick Jagger!), Clinton quips that while “politics is show business for ugly people,” work in the non-governmental sector is “show businesses for nerds.” For this week, at least, he’s right, it’s been quite a spectacle. Thank goodness there’s 12 months until the next one.”
What is required to meet the health MDGs?- Blog 4 Global Health – “The discussion was set in the context of the global shortage of health workers and the fact that the health MDGs would not be achieved unless there are new, substantial and sustained investments in health workers.”
——-
The Corporatization of Global Health – End the Neglect - “Corporations have been extremely present this week. It’s clear that the private sector has finally recognized that global development matters to their interests. Decades of speeches on the value of development for the world as a whole have finally, it seems, taken hold. The question is, what does this mean for international development, and for global health?”
Caught between Growing Up and Waking Up – Shotgun Shack – “As I get older I’m trying to mature. To not harbor the younger rebellious me’s feelings about the injustices of how things are set up. To understand the give and take of the real world. To realize that “that’s how the world works” and “the poor will always be with us”. To remember that it’s bad to take an us vs. them approach. To realize that we need the wealthy and the corporations as partners to change the world. To believe the new head of USAID when he says that Coca Cola and the military are at the core of the new development community (as I heard via Twitter this morning).”
Influencing global politics - Dochas Network’s Blog – “Obviously, these General Assemblies and Summit meetings are largely spectacles for the politicians’ home fronts. The real decisions are made elsewhere, and in different ways. Like in any national parliament, the purpose of the Plenary meetings is not to convince others, but to provide a forum to explain the rationale for the decisions already taken.”
Developing Communities not Countries - Huffington Post – “But data implies that development functions on a smaller scale rather than on a larger one. When Hans Rosling dissects country bubbles in his visualizations, he illustrates that average information hides vast differences between regions’ development achievements. He argues that, because “there’s such a lot of difference within countries, it’s not relevant to have [average data] on a regional level. We must be much more detailed.” Bill Easterly takes that extra step and, by zooming into New York City, reveals that significant socioeconomic differences exist even in neighborhoods consisting merely of city blocks.”
A new mood at the MDG Summit – ODI – “Breathe the atmosphere here at the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals this week and, for the first time in several years, there’s a whiff of hope. Less of the language of ‘Development Emergency’, and more encouraging numbers – on just how many more girls are attending school, for example, how many children are being immunised, and how many households now have clean water. The shift is subtle, but it is real, and is reflected in speeches, media stories, and in the conversational buzz in the crowded coffee bar in the temporary UN Building.”
Tackling corruption will fast-track progress on the millennium development goals – The Guardian Blog - “The key driver of that faster growth, the bonanza of natural resource extraction, is a two-edged sword. The value of the resources to be extracted from impoverished economies is enormous: if it translates into revenues that are well-spent it will be transformational. But the historical record of resource extraction in these societies is abysmal: money that could have delivered the millennium development goals instead corroded governance”
Moving beyond MDG Silos – globalhealthpolicy.net – “A key strength of the MDGs has been their simplicity and scope. The flip side of the coin is a tendency towards a ‘silo model’ of interpretation. Each MDG has its own cluster of experts, advocates, and donors, and recent economic modelling exercises have attempted to order MDG priorities on a cost-benefit basis. The result is a tendency towards a fragmented interpretation of the MDG framework in public policy discourse.”
Obama’s Remarks From Yesterday At MDG Conference – A View from the Cave – (Video of Obama’s speech)
Boast, Build and Sell - NYT Op-Ed – “The U.N. set eight landmark antipoverty objectives in 2000, so this year’s General Assembly is reviewing how we’re doing after a decade. We’re off-track on most of these Millennium Development Goals, so let me offer three suggestions for how the humanitarian world might do better in framing the fight against poverty”
Women Take Center Stage at Opening of Clinton Global Initiative – Change.org – “If there was a theme to the day, it was that improvement in any field — education, global health, poverty — depended on recognizing and removing detriments to the health, safety and success of girls and women.”
Girls Empowerment and the CGI - GirlsReport’s Blog – “If you have been following the sessions you will know that this year we had not one, but four panels dedicated to ‘girls empowerment’. In fact, the opening plenary session of the conference chaired by former president Bill Clinton was titled ‘Empowering Girls and Women’. We then had a chance to hear about ‘preparing girls for the world’, ‘Securing the health and safety of girls’ and ‘Girls from Education to Economic Empowerment’.”
——-
The Save the World Clock - Foreign Policy – “Yet a decade on, it’s clear the world has too often, and in too many cases, fallen behind. There has been progress: School enrollment for example, has skyrocketed even in the poorest countries, and the world will likely meet its goal to halve poverty overall. But while countries such as Ghana and Rwanda have made strides, many others are showing little improvement. For instance, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s pre-summit report notes that without China, progress on overall poverty rates “does not look very encouraging. In fact, the number of people living in extreme poverty actually went up between 1990 and 2005.” Gender equality and women’s rights have shown the least improvement since 2000. Inequality has remained stubbornly high; children from the poorest households worldwide, for example, are twice as likely to die as their wealthy peers.”
UN Week Notes: Tuesday - Blood and Milk – “I’ll be doing one of these entries each day, with a few notes on the most interesting things I attended and any thoughts I had to share. I’ll have some more reflective and detailed posts coming, but I wanted to share the basics of this experience as fast as possible.”
Privilege – Tales from the Hood - “The whole MDG endeavor including this summit embodies what for me are the crowning ironies and paradoxes of Humanitarianism. While those aid workers in my close personal circle consider it a great privilege to be able to do the work that we do, few of us would call ourselves “privileged” in the sense commonly connoted by the word in American speech. We didn’t attend Ivy League schools, we don’t drive expensive cars, our houses are modest, our salaries pale in comparison with those of high-school classmates who made their fortunes in the corporate sector. And even so there’s no denying that we are privileged, at least compared with the vast, vast majority of the population of this planet.”
Why the MDGs Need Critical Friends – devex – “World leaders in New York this week need to prove them wrong. What the MDGs need now is not scepticism or naivety, but critical friends. These are friends who acknowledge the value of the MDGs, face up to the evidence about their strengths and weaknesses and have something constructive to say about next steps.”
UN Week Digital Media Lounge: Using Film to Change Lives - A View from the Cave – “While Baron spoke of her work bringing film to the developing world, it was Russell who asked the most interesting questions. Who is entitled to tell someone’s story? Am I qualified enough, do I know the nuances of a culture? Am I more qualified than an Ethiopian to discuss abortion in Ethiopia because if my reach?”
——-
what’s missing – Texas in Africa – “This week’s events brought home one very clear fact for me: Western thinking about development is elite-driven. Almost entirely.”
UN Week DML: Panel on TB - A View from the Cave – “Much of the discussion involved two points. First, lack of access to adequate drugs and second, stigmas that exist in communities in regards to TB. The lack of access point, unpacked, hit on a lot of causes. Reichman noted that TB is an “un-sexy” disease. While HIV/AIDS and malaria get all of the attention.”
Hillary, Stoves Won’t Save the World – How Matters - “‘Hillary Clinton set to unveil initiative on clean cooking stoves,’ is among today’s highlights at the Millennium Development Goals Summit. Indeed, climate change, deforestation, global health, and women’s empowerment are extremely important issues to address.
Yet, I am extremely wary of any products manufactured in the developed world that are touted, marketed, or delivered to “make life better” for poor people in the developing world.”
The Millennium Development What? - Aid Watch – “So people in countries that receive aid are more likely to be aware of the MDGs than people in the countries that give it. This probably doesn’t come as a shock. After all, aid policy in recipient countries affects people’s daily lives, determining for many whether they will get a loan for their small business, whether their crops will be competitive at market, whether their child will be vaccinated against a deadly disease. But aid policy in donor countries makes little difference to most. Simply put, people know when it pays to know.”
What’s all this talk about Millennium Development Goals? – Going International – “How can local and national NGOs link to the MDGs? Like other documents with universal appeal (and media attention) the MDGs when understood and used effectively can help local and national NGOs in many ways including: (1) Finding partners to forward their own work and the leverage it to have greater impact and (2) Increasing their opportunities to catch the attention of policy makers and funders who are following these broader global issues.”
——-
The Millennium Development Goal that really does work has been forgotten - Aid Watch – “The Millennium Development Goals tragically misused the world’s goodwill to support failed official aid approaches to global poverty and gave virtually no support to proven approaches. Economists such as Jeffrey Sachs might argue that the system can be improved by ditching bilateral aid and moving towards a “multi-donor” approach modelled on the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. But current experience and history both speak loudly that the only real engine of growth out of poverty is private business, and there is no evidence that aid fuels such growth.”
Real lives, real choices: 142 girls and 8 MDGs – Wait… What? “As powerful world leaders gather in New York this week to discuss accelerating progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, this report is a sobering and intimate reminder of the real inequalities girls, especially the poorest girls, face, and the struggles their family go through to keep them alive and help them to thrive. The cohort study tells us that primary school enrollment rates in Sub Saharan Africa are up from 58% in 1990 to 76% in 2008, but in the poorest 20% of households, 39% of girls don’t attend school. The cohort study shows us, through the stories of the 130 girls who are still part of the cohort group, the very real impact on very real lives that failure to reach the MDGs has. The reality is that the poorest girls do not have what they need to survive, develop and participate fully.”
Maybe this is why accountability for Millennium Development Goals did not work out that well - Aid Watch - (the entire post is a single chart)
5 ways ICTs can support the MDGs – Wait… What? – “…5 ways that ICTs can facilitate accountability and transparency, citizen engagement, and public debate, all of which are necessary to bring about development improvements and achieve the MDGs. Obviously these are not the only ways ICTs can support the MDGs, but this post would have been miles long if I’d listed all the initiatives that are out there.”
