MDGs and Jeffrey Sachs

Since the question for this week is pretty broad, I decided to focus specifically on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that we watched in the YouTube video. When I think of the MDGs the first thing that comes to mind is Jeffrey Sachs’ book "The End of Poverty" (which was one of the first books I read that was related to public health). The book describes his role in developing the Millennium Development Goals and lays out the eight goals to be reached by 2015....but as I read the document my first reaction was one of shock... this was the first time people had formally come together to lay out these goals?!! Wasn't the world already dealing with these major problems and hadn't there been a united effort before? I was also expecting the MDGs to be much more specific about each target goal and how they were realistically going to achieve them. Sachs describes how the MDGS basically repeated long held commitments of the international community that had not been fulfilled in the past. For example, the international community’s 1978 pledge of “Health for All by the Year 2000,” fell short when the world arrived in 2000 with the AIDS pandemic, resurgent TB and malaria, and billions of the world’s poor was left without reliable, or sometimes any, access to essential health services. Other past efforts include the World Summit for Children in 1990, where the world pledged universal access to primary education by the year 2000, yet 130 million or more primary-aged children were not in school by then. The rich world had also famously committed to the target of 0.7 percent of GNP devoted to official development assistance, direct financial aid to poor countries, yet the share of financial aid from rich-world GNP actually declined from 0.3 to 0.2 percent during the 1990s. Yet Sachs still says that “[…] there was a palpable sense that this time-yes, this time-[the goals] just might be fulfilled.” (213) So what would make the effort more successful this time? New power of modern technologies? The strength of the ongoing economic boom? Our increasing global interconnectedness? Instead, he goes on to say how quickly optimism toward the MDGs were shattered because of the U.S. trauma of a tied national election, the end of the stock market boom, a spate of high-profile corporate scandals, but most of all the events of September 11th and the unwise ways in which the U.S. government reacted. I cannot help but get the sense that he knows that the current effort toward the MDGs will not be any more effective than past efforts. Throughout the book he never provides the reader with any reassurance as to why the MDGs would be more effective this time around. At the same time, I do not want to react too negatively toward the MDGs because I think that progress is important even if targets are missed. Setting out these goals can lead to progress being accelerated, even if at a snails pace. A passage he writes in the preface to his book has stayed with me,

“When the end of poverty arrives, as it can and should in our own generation, it will be citizens in a million communities in rich and poor countries alike, rather than a handful of political leaders, who will have turned the tide. The fight for the end of poverty is a fight that all of us must join in our own way […] We have exciting times ahead, and no time to lose.”

References:
Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: How we can make it happen in our lifetime. London: Penguin. 2005.