The UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals will assess the progress made—and what further action is needed—by the international community to reach targets by 2015. But another area of critical focus is the “missing MDG”: providing electricity to the 1.5 billion people who do not have access to modern energy.

The case for linking energy access to achieving the MDGs is counted by the hours that women and children spend gathering agricultural residue and dung for fuel; by the toll of respiratory illnesses caused by indoor air pollution; and by the frustration of small business owners who cannot expand business because of the lack of reliable energy. Lack of basic access to energy affects over 550 million Sub-Saharan Africans, mostly living in rural areas but increasingly found in the fringes of rapidly growing cities; over 600 million people in South Asia, mainly living in rural India; and significant but dispersed pockets of poor in other regions, including in middle-income countries that have been bypassed by the grid. The broader energy crisis in Africa, (documented by the Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic project), with 30 countries facing chronic blackouts and universal energy access seemingly more than 50 years away, makes the challenge particularly stark. It is critical to note that achievement of universal basic energy access will not drive further global temperature increases. It is estimated (pdf) that emissions would only increase by 1.3 percent above current levels.

Movement toward providing universal access to modern energy services could be an important building block in bridging the large trust gap in the global climate negotiations. This gap has many causes, but suspicion looms large that the climate agenda will divert resources from critical needs like energy access. Developing country leaders are concerned that their efforts to expand energy access will be complicated by calls to focus only on low-emission solutions, without the needed climate finance to ensure that these are affordable. The Least Developed Countries worry that the cost of adapting to climate change (most recent World Bank estimates puts this cost at $14-17 billion per year for Africa alone) will divert resources away from the provision of basic services like modern energy. A strong push now to close the energy access gap will send an important signal to climate negotiators that their very real concerns have been heard.

While the provision of basic energy services to the poor will not exacerbate the climate crisis, least developed countries should not miss out on the opportunities for transformation resulting from the clean energy revolution. Often in partnership with the private sector, new opportunities for expanding cleaner energy supply can arise, including technologies like hydropower or transitional fuels like gas. Others energy sources, like geo-thermal, are reaching affordability but financial and capacity barriers still need to be addressed. Leap-frogging to bottom-up, distributed energy solutions like mini-grids supported by renewable energies like mini-hydroelectric and solar photovoltaics (PV) can bring down otherwise prohibitive costs of serving dispersed communities. This is especially critical given the low income levels of poor families. Others solutions will require more tailored incentives, including feed-in tariffs to attract investment in scaled wind farms; significant climate-financing support to scale up concentrated solar power initiatives where costs are still prohibitive, especially for developing countries; and R&D partnerships to accelerate testing of carbon capture and sequestration for countries where coal is abundant and likely to remain the least costly solution. In all cases, plans for new generation to support the grid need to be accompanied by energy efficiency strategies.

As stated above, the private sector can play a strong role. Entrepreneurs are innovating and finding new energy solutions: clean cooking stoves, low-cost solar solutions in dispersed settlements, and distributed energy systems for tomorrow’s “green” cities. Other solutions will require large capital investments, yet today’s global economic conditions make capital in relatively riskier settings scarce. Public-private partnerships, supported by multi-lateral guarantees, and more accessible climate finance to buy down the costs and risks of new technologies, can help. An example of this is the Scaling-Up Renewable Energy for Low-Income Countries program, one of the initiatives from the Climate Investment Funds. It is providing $284 million in subsidies to scale up and accelerate use of renewable solutions in six pilot countries, acting as a catalyst for transforming renewable markets.

Finally, meeting the energy access challenge will require well-recognized, good practice public policy. There is no substitute for good governance and for a supportive policy framework. Targets and results measurement, capacity development and enabling legislation to support rural electrification and clean energy solutions, strong social and environmental standards, and utility reform, will all be critical. And reforms to pricing regimes that eliminate tariff subsidies for the well-off while re-directing support to investments in servicing the poor will be essential.

As delegates to the MDG Summit debate ways to accelerate action to improve the lives of billions of poor people, universal energy access will make its way onto the agenda. Expect calls over the next year, bolstered by the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Group on Energy and Climate Change report, Energy for a Sustainable Future (pdf), for a big push toward universal energy access by 2030. It is time—or in fact, overdue—that we recognize that meeting the MDGs and taking action on global climate change will not be achieved without bringing modern energy services to the poor.

On September 20-22, world leaders will convene in New York for a United Nations summit to evaluate the progress of the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In advance of the U.N. Summit, Johannes F. Linn, Daniel Kaufmann, Veronika Penciakova, Laurence Chandy, John Mutenyo and Emmanuel Asmah assess the progress that has been made toward achieving the MDGs, obstacles that hinder the U.N.’s efforts, and whether the initiative will ultimately be a success.

We Need to Scale up Successful Interventions Systematically to Achieve the MDGs
Johannes F. Linn, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development

Many countries won’t achieve the MDG targets by 2015 if current trends continue. The common response is to argue for more aid and faster implementation of programs. This would certainly help, but more importantly governments and aid agencies need to focus much more systematically on scaling up successful development interventions.
 
Unfortunately, most aid-supported projects are very small and unconnected to each other given the fragmentation of donor agencies and programs, both official and private. Between 1999 and 2008, the median size of official donor projects as reported by the OECD-Development Assistance Committee dropped from a small $120,000 and an even smaller $70,000! Of course, small projects can be great. However, if they don’t systematically build on and learn from each other, and if every new intervention pilots a new idea rather than replicating, expanding and scaling up what has worked before, then we lose opportunities to have an impact on people’s lives in a way that is significant enough to tackle the global development challenge so well identified by the MDGs.
 
Traditionally, the development community has put a great premium on innovative interventions. Political, bureaucratic and individual incentives tend to be aligned to support the development of new ideas, experiments and pilots. The replication and scaling up of successful interventions are too often seen as politically unattractive, of little interest to the aid bureaucracies and boring for the individual expert. We urgently need a more balanced approach to ensure that scaling up receives the attention it deserves.
 
There are examples of deliberate scaling up. The Chinese development approach has been precisely that: experiment and replicate what works on a broad scale. The Mexican conditional cash transfer program Progresa-Oportunidades was specifically designed to scale up successful pilots to a national scale and has improved the lives of 5 million poor Mexican families. The Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was established in 2002 to substantially reduce the incidence of these three diseases and achieve MDG 4: “reduce child mortality” and MDG 6: “combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases” through scaling up proven interventions.
 
But these examples are the exceptions. If the international development community is serious about achieving the MDGs, all development agencies need to focus very explicitly and systematically on the scaling up opportunities and challenges by replicating their own successes, by drawing on pilots others have successfully developed, by collaborating with partners or by deliberately handing off to them those initiatives that have produced results.


Shedding Light on the MDGs through Better Governance
Daniel Kaufmann, Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development
Veronika Penciakova, Research Assistant, Global Economy and Development

Five years remain to meet the eight Millennium Development Goals. Though laudable progress has been made in some regions, like East Asia, and on some targets, such as access to clean water, various goals are likely to remain unmet by 2015.

While much of MDG data predates the economic crisis, such data and recent U.N. projections indicate very uneven progress. Recent updates (pdf) show evidence of setbacks due to the economic crisis. The United Nations estimates that the world may reduce poverty from 46 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2015, but this masks enormous variation across regions and countries. In 2005, 17 percent of the population in East Asia lived in extreme poverty compared to 51 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Since the economic crisis, preliminary evidence suggests that an addition 64 million people will fall into poverty by 2010.

Other targets will also remain out of reach. Prior to the economic crisis and rising food prices Latin America and the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and Eastern Asia (driven by China) were on their way to halving undernourishment. But, the dual crises have undermined progress worldwide. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates over a billion people may have been undernourished in 2009 compared to 817 million in 1990.

There are many explanations for slow and uneven progress on the MDGs, ranging from insufficient donor commitments to the choice of indicators. But, a big answer appears to lie in the highly variable quality of governance across countries.

Our research suggests that improving governance from the extremely low level of Afghanistan to the subpar level of countries like Kenya, or from the subpar level of Kenya to the higher level of Ghana, contributes significantly to major declines in infant mortality and increases in incomes. MDG progress is likely related to under-emphasized political dimensions (pdf) of governance such as freedom of the press and human rights. Research shows, for instance, that female empowerment, education and income help reduce child and maternal mortality rates.

Ultimately, aid alone is far from sufficient to ensure goals are met. Just as access to electricity is often cited as the missing MDG, governance has also been forgotten as a key pillar of achieving the MDGs. Aid becomes more effective when there is satisfactory or at least improving governance in recipient countries and when aid is efficiently and transparently allocated. Similarly, responsible governance and transparency in industrialized countries is critical for development effectiveness as demonstrated by the economic crisis.

An extended version of Daniel Kaufmann's commentary can be found here.


The Good and the Bad on the MDGs
Laurence Chandy, Fellow, Global Economy and Development, Wolfensohn Center for Development

The official message from next week’s United Nations MDG Summit will be that the goals are within reach, but only if we muster one, final, almighty, great push. There is some truth to this. Great strides have already been made at a global level on poverty reduction, primary and secondary education, preventable disease control and access to clean water, partly as a result of focused interventions. Meanwhile, obtaining results in other areas—women’s and children’s health, and sanitation—has proven much more difficult. It is here we will likely see the launch of new initiatives.
 
A more candid assessment of the MDGs, however, would highlight both good and bad news.
 
Among the good news is that developing country economies, as a whole, proved resilient through the crisis and are now driving global economic growth. While economic growth is conspicuously absent from the Millennium Declaration, it is absolutely pivotal to the achievement of the goals. Second, aid levels have remained strong, growing by 11.7 and 0.7 percent in 2008 and 2009—a result contrary to all expectations. Third, in contrast to the last MDG Summit five years ago when the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. attempted to strike out any mention of the goals in the draft resolution, the U.S. is expected to play a leading role this time around, referencing a new National Security Strategy (pdf) and U.S. MDG strategy (pdf) that fully embrace the global development agenda.
 
The bad news is that the fight for the MDGs is being lost in fragile states. No fragile country has yet achieved a single goal. Worse still, understanding of how to provide and secure basic living standards in these difficult environments remains very limited. Other worrying news is that MDG reporting is patchy, dated and often unreliable. This provides a weak evidence base on which to design more targeted efforts for the next five years.
 
Finally, at a time when budget pinches loom large, expect cries for value for money to outweigh those for more aid flows. Hopefully, this can help revitalize discussions on aid effectiveness in time for next year’s High Level Forum in Busan.


Reducing Poverty and Hunger in Africa: Increasing Market Access and Local Procurement of Food
John Mutenyo, Africa Research Fellow, Global Economy and Development, Africa Growth Initiative

Among the eight Millennium Development Goals, eradicating poverty and hunger tackles one of the most basic human needs, the achievement of which can only have positive repercussions on the other MDGs. While many Asian and Latin American countries are on course toward achieving at least some of the targets, most sub-Saharan African countries are lagging behind in almost all areas. For instance, at the level of $1.25 a day, global poverty declined from 52 percent in 1981 to 25 percent in 2005, but the level remained at 50 percent for sub-Saharan Africa. The prevalence of hunger in the developing regions has fluctuated sharply over the years due to the rise and fall of global food prices and compounded by the global financial crisis. Hunger in sub-Saharan Africa is alarming, escalating from 28 percent in 1990 to 32 percent in 2008. According to the 2009 State of Uganda Population Report (pdf), about 40 percent of child deaths in Uganda are due to malnutrition, partly caused by food insecurity.

The World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report advocates for increased investment in agriculture in developing countries because this sector is essential not only for food security but for overall growth and poverty reduction. According to the report, GDP growth originating in agriculture is about four times more effective in reducing poverty than GDP growth from non-agricultural sectors. However, barriers still exist to exporting and distributing crop yields. Several African countries such as Kenya, Malawi and Uganda have recently experienced bumper harvests of maize and other crops. But due to a lack of markets, famers have witnessed their harvests rot while neighboring countries like Sudan and Somalia experienced famine.

Studies on local and regional procurement of food aid in Uganda and Ethiopia have shown that it provides much greater net benefits for rural and urban populations than equivalent expenditure on tied food aid. Yet many developed countries still insist on shipping their home-grown food to developing economies, sometimes flooding local markets and injuring the livelihoods of local producers. With poor infrastructure and a lack of effective regional trading systems, countries cannot take advantage of the resources all around them.

At this MDG Summit, the U.S. and other development partners have an opportunity to work together with African governments to increase the direct purchase of agricultural commodities from African farmers and redistribute them in famine-stricken areas. Availability of ready markets will act as a safety net to poor farmers and will provide incentives for increased investment in the agriculture sector, which in turn could lead to multiplicative effects of increased employment, food production, savings, and even investment in other MDGs, such as education. What is lacking is political will in the U.S. for such a change.


More Action, Less Talk Needed for Achieving MDGs by 2015
Emmanuel Ekow Asmah, Africa Research Fellow, Global Economy and Development, Africa Growth Initiative

It’s been over 10 years since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and it’s clear that progress toward achieving the 2015 targets has been very slow, especially in the developing world. According to a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report released in early 2010, if the world continues at the current pace, most developing countries will not be able to reach the MDG targets. Therefore, there is a serious need to step up the pace dramatically.

As far as the most influential factors in achieving the MDGs are concerned, there are literally thousands of studies, documents and blueprints on the best practices. Economic growth, investment in agriculture, good governance, political stability, internal peace, rule of law, rural infrastructure, agricultural research, better education for children in rural areas and improving the situation of women are some of the necessary and sufficient factors that have been researched and identified. However, what has been missing is a concerted effort and the political will to translate this knowledge and information into meaningful actions and results. A lot of time, effort and money are spent on summits, conferences and workshops from which excellent plans are drawn. But very little is done by way of putting these plans into action. The change required is for our political leaders and development partners to deliver on their commitments, from increasing investment in health care and agriculture to improving human rights and tackling corruption.

In the light of this, delegates participating in this year’s MDG Summit will bring with them country action plans for the next five years, which will serve as the basis for a global MDG development action plan. The greatest challenge rests with how to generate the political will for action. Even the most effective organizational reforms will prove insufficient if government leaders do not have the motivation to implement agreed plans. I have two recommendations for generating effective political action. First, harness the power of the media through communications vehicles, such as the TV, internet, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere and smart mobile devices. This can create new capacities to mobilize populations and coordinate mass action for political action on the MDGs.

Second, foster deeper cooperation among governments, academia, the nongovernmental sector and international organizations in the monitoring and implementation of the MDG-based development plans. This is based on the recognition that there are numerous areas where governments are ineffective because they lack the requisite human resources to implement plans. Everybody else has a role to play in this respect.

The international community has scored a major success in Africa by supporting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of universal primary education. Gross primary-school enrollment rates rose from 79 percent in 1999 to 92 percent in 2004, and the average literacy rate (in the 29 countries for which data exist) rose from 54 percent to 62 percent. Some 87 percent of Africans today live in countries where the average primary enrollment rate is over 75 percent. Of the seven leading countries worldwide in boosting primary completion rates, six are in Africa.

This success has, however, brought new concerns. One is that educational quality has not kept pace with quantity, even at the primary level. This is especially worrisome in view of recent research that suggests that the quality of education has a stronger impact on economic growth than years of schooling, after countries have passed a threshold level of average literacy and per capita years of schooling.

More worrying is Africa’s large and growing skills gap with the rest of the world. While East Asia increased secondary enrollment by 21 percentage points and tertiary enrollment by 12 percentage points between 1990 and 2002, Africa raised its secondary enrollment rate by only seven percentage points and its tertiary rate by just one. The quality of secondary and tertiary education is not easy to gauge—because there are few surveys of educational quality—but it is unlikely to have improved. Staff to student ratios in West African universities increased from 1:16 in 1990 to 1:32 in 2007. Employer surveys report that Africa’s tertiary graduates are weak in problem solving, business understanding, computer use, and communication skills.

The lack of skills has serious implications for Africa’s ability to compete in the global economy and for its efforts to build the private sector. Recent research indicates that there is a strong link between export success and the percentage of the labor force that has completed post primary schooling. There is also limited evidence to suggest that enterprises managed by university graduates in Africa have a higher propensity to export. More broad-based evidence shows that among firms owned by indigenous entrepreneurs, those with university educated owners tend to show higher growth rates.

Increasing access at the post primary level will take money. Africa’s tight fiscal environments leave limited budget space for increasing secondary and tertiary expenditures. The costs of reaching the final few percent of potential primary students are rising rapidly, further crowding out of post-primary expenditures from the education budget. Real expenditure on tertiary education in Africa fell by about 28 percent between 1990 and 2002 and expenditure per pupil declined six fold.

As long as the international development community remains focused on achieving the MDG goal of universal primary completion, Africa’s skills gap with the rest of the world will continue to grow. It is difficult to mobilize donor support for improving quality at all levels, and access at the post primary level, when “success” is measured solely in terms of primary enrollment.

A new education MDG is needed, especially for Africa. The MDG Summit is the right place and now is the right time to begin a serious discussion of rewriting the education MDG. The appeal of the universal primary education goal is its simplicity: that is also its undoing. What is needed is a more nuanced measure of success in building human capital: one that reflects the importance of educational quality and the relevance of post-primary skills. Without a more balanced goal, Africa will remain starved for the resources needed to close the skills gap.

This week, leaders from around the world will gather in New York to participate in the U.N. Summit on the Millennium Development Goals to take stock of progress made over the past decade and accelerate those efforts in advance of the 2015 target. Education is at the core of two of those goals: Goal 2 of universal primary completion and Goal 3 of gender equity at all levels of education. When the world leaders discuss their progress on these two goals, they will report on the following indicators: the number of children in primary school, the proportion of children who start in grade 1 that complete their primary education, literacy rate of 15-24 year olds by gender, and the ratio of girls to boys in primary, secondary, and higher education. [1]

Measuring progress by these indicators, education will appear to be one of the more successful of the global development goals thus far. Primary school enrollment rates in developing regions have increased from 83 percent in 2000 to 89 percent in 2008, a notable accomplishment particularly in the face of increasing population rates in many of these countries. Over the last 10 years, the primary school enrollment gap between high-income and low-income countries has closed almost completely. [2]
Education stakeholders from local communities to national governments to international bodies must be commended for the tremendous effort made to expand access to schooling for boys and girls around the world.

Yet, declaring global education reform successful is problematic. First, the current pace of progress on enrollment will fall short by an estimated 56 million children who will still be out of primary school in 2015. Second, primary completion levels lag significantly behind reported enrollment levels. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 30 percent of students drop out before reaching the last grade of primary school. Third, there is a hidden early learning crisis that exists beyond the global metrics focused on enrollment and completion rates: in many developing countries, children are spending two, three, four, and even more years in school without acquiring fundamental literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking skills that are the backbone of relevant education. Although youth literacy is included as one indicator, from a pedagogical perspective, children who are failing to learn to read must be identified as early possible to improve their overall learning trajectory. Glick and Sahn found that primary school completion in Senegal was affected most by a child’s performance in grade 2. [3] Thus, while knowing how many kids enroll in school and how many complete a full primary cycle is important, learning outcomes in the early grades is the missing data needed to measure progress toward achieving universal quality education.

Focus on the Education, Not the MDG

Evident in the increasing number of rapid reading assessments conducted in primary schools worldwide, some countries show that 50, 80 and even 90 percent of children cannot read a single word by the end of grade 2. [4] While the majority of these assessments have been conducted at the end of grade 2 and beginning of grade 3 in order to modify teaching and learning practices as soon as possible, the low learning levels persist through grade 3 and beyond. At the global level, primary completion rates have been considered an acceptable proxy for quality education. However, using completion as a stand-in for quality assumes that children who complete five or six years of primary school have learned to read, calculate, and think critically. For example, in 2008 Honduras had a 97 percent net enrollment rate for primary school, an 84 percent primary completion rate, and yet about 1 in 3 students are non-readers at the end of grade 2. Malawi has achieved a 91 percent primary enrollment rate and yet 28 percent of grade 4 children are Chichewa non-readers, 56 percent are English non-readers and only 33 percent of students are completing primary school. In Uganda, where 97 percent of students are enrolled in primary school, only 44 percent complete it. And there are striking differences in early reading levels throughout Uganda, with more than 80 percent of grade 2 students in the Lango Subregion not being able to read at grade level, compared to around half of grade 2 students in the Central Region. [5]

Given these types of findings in many developing countries around the world, how much weight does a country government report hold when the calculated number of primary school completions includes students who have not acquired the basic knowledge and skill sets? At the global level, countries (donors and recipients alike) are fixated on achieving the MDGs; yet they are ignoring the main objective: to foster the next generation of citizens that is able to participate fully in the economic, political, and social roles of their community.

Learning, not Enrollment, is Driver of Development

The global education agenda began to take shape in Jomtien in 1990 with the World Declaration on Education for All, which asserted that: “For basic education to be equitable, all children, youth and adults must be given the opportunity to achieve and maintain an acceptable level of learning.” [6] Article 4 explicitly laid out the central importance of learning, that “meaningful development… depends ultimately on whether people actually learn as a result of those opportunities, i.e., whether they incorporate useful knowledge, reasoning ability, skills, and values.” [7] The Dakar World Education Conference in 2000 reaffirmed this approach to education in the adoption of six Education for All (EFA) goals that included comprehensive early child development, primary education, youth learning, and adult literacy and emphasized throughout the importance of gender equity and the quality of education. [8]
These six goals were developed together to kick-start development by expanding the pockets of educational excellence available to reach all children, youth and adults everywhere.

In 1990, it was clear that learning must be at the core of education reform efforts. More recently, that approachhas been further bolstered by economic analysis showing that the true benefits of education for long-run development are derived from learning achievements, not just increasing the number of years in school. Their evaluation showed that an additional year of schooling that does not result in learning has no effect on economic growth. The powerful effects of cognitive skills on individual earnings, on the distribution of income across society, and on economic growth support a causal interpretation of their results. [9] Thus learning, not enrollment and completion, must be the minimum educational goal to which we aspire.

Early Reading as a Necessary First Step Toward Equitable Learning

Equitable learning, which was at the core of the original global education movement, must once again be elevated to the top of the education agenda. Continuing education reform efforts without sufficient focus on learning results in one of two untenable situations: either expanded universal schooling opportunities without actual learning; or increased learning for a small population of elites. Neither situation will reduce poverty and improve living conditions for the bottom billion citizens of the world. This “equitable learning crisis” requires urgent attention.
 
According to a new analysis by UNESCO’s EFA Global Monitoring Report team, over 170 million people could be lifted out of poverty if all students in low-income countries acquired basic reading skills. [10]
This finding builds on an expansive and growing body of evidence on how education is a core ingredient to achieve the other development goals, including that educating women and children result in healthier and wealthier families.

Learning to Read is Learning for All

Learning to read, including the related tasks of text comprehension and analysis, is a fundamental skill upon which many other cognitive skills are based. As they progress through school, students acquire an increasing amount of information by reading texts; poorly developed literacy skills severely compromise a student’s ability to access new knowledge. The acquisition of early reading skills is one good proxy for assessing learning outcomes more broadly. Thus, in addition to measuring net enrollment, primary completion, and youth and adult literacy, progress on achieving universal primary education should be measured by the proportion of students who, by the end of primary school, are able to read with comprehension, according to their country’s own curricular goals. Adding a fourth indicator to MDG 2 is an important step toward fulfilling the basic human right of every citizen to an education. The importance of learning is undisputable. The case for measuring early reading as an indicator of progress on the universal education goals can be substantiated on a number of fronts, including the following three arguments: 

1. Human Rights Approach to Education. A child who leaves primary school without acquiring basic literacy is being denied her human right to education. Basing success on illiterate graduates is unethical and plays a political game at the expense of people. Counting heads in classrooms shirks the international commitment to ensuring that all children have a basic education.

2. Good Place to Start. No single measurable indicator will suffice as the measure of progress toward achieving universal education. However, focusing on basic reading skills represents an essential component of the global education goals and provides a floor from which greater attention to learning achievements, including numeracy, critical thinking, and social-emotional skills, can be founded. The wide uptake of rapid reading assessments conducted in the first three years of primary school demonstrates that we have a straightforward way of measuring early literacy acquisition.

3. Educating the World about Education. By measuring progress through enrollment and completion, global education reform remains primarily focused on an access-driven agenda. Despite a growing emphasis on the quality learning agenda among important stakeholders, too many policy statements are still focused almost entirely on increasing access to education with little to no mention of improving the quality of learning in the classroom. Even the World Bank, which has spent 2010 developing its education sector strategy for the next 10 years, recently announced that its commitment to help countries achieve the education MDGs will be used “to support innovative interventions that improve access” and address demand-side obstacles to “school enrollment and attendance.” [11] An equitable learning approach removes the false choice between access and quality and positions the real goal of education – knowledge acquisition and skill development – at the center of achieving education for all children, youth and adults.

1. Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. Skeptics of adding a new education indicator—focused on measuring learning outcomes—have cited that there is no political appetite for adding or changing existing indicators. The majority of the analysis and commentary is focused on how far away countries are from the established targets and what frameworks and ways of working need to be established to accelerate progress toward the goals. Over the course of the last decade, there has been some, albeit minimal, change in the targets and indicators, with the MDG Monitoring Framework being revised for Goals 1, 5, 6, and 7 in 2007. The process, organized by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on MDG Indicators and involving leadership from the Secretary-General and agreement by the General Assembly, was understandably complex and drawn out (beginning with the 2005 World Summit and being formally presented in January 2008). The global health community has already set a precedent for expanding and revising the MDGs when faced with hard evidence and new information that emerges over time; efforts this year have successfully elevated non-communicable diseases (e.g. cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes) to be considered one of the most significant health challenges facing the MDGs.

2. Indicators are Secondary to Implementation. Others argue that targets and indicators are only mile-markers toward the ultimate goal of education for all. Therefore, the focus of efforts must stay on the programming necessary to ensure equitable learning. Yet mile-markers play an important role in letting you know where you are in relation to where you started and where you are going. Thus, in a world of infinite goals and finite means, mobilizing the necessary political will, public attention, and financial resources to achieve universal education requires a strong clear case for what education is accomplishing and what still needs to be done. Progress in enrollment and completion needs to be considered through the lens of learning to appropriately focus investments from 2010-2015.

3. Making the Same Mistake All Over Again. Adding an indicator that measures reading skills at the end of primary school is considered by some to be too narrow a focus, with references to the critiques of the enrollment and completion indicators made above. Barrett (2009) argues that focusing on one simple measurement of cognitive learning may be detrimental to learning more broadly conceived, including mathematics, science, and non-cognitive skills. This argument gets at the crux of the debate between two old sayings: “What gets measured gets done” and “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that is counted counts.” If we want children to learn to read, there must be some level of focus to ensure that this happens; however, learning to read is not the only skill that matters and educational efforts must include a broader conception of the full spectrum of cognitive and non-cognitive skills needed to live a full and productive life. Measuring progress by assessing the number of children who can read with comprehension at grade level by the end of primary school builds on the evidence that reading is an early and essential building block of learning. It also assures that by the end of primary school, children emerge able to read new texts and learn independently. Adding an early reading indicator demonstrates that basic literacy is a necessary but not sufficient intermediate goal toward achieving universal education.

Ensuring that all boys and girls complete primary schooling is the target of the second Millennium Development Goal (MDG)—achieving universal primary education. To date, the developing world has made great strides in reaching that goal. According to the U.N. 2009 Millennium Development Goal Report, there was progress in universal primary enrollment from 83 percent in 2000 to 88 percent in 2007 in all developing countries. And according to the World Development Indicators, enrollment levels for sub-Saharan Africa rose from 58 percent in 2000 to 74 percent in 2007.

Despite these gains, there is still much more progress to be made. The major obstacle to achieving universal primary education arises from the unequal opportunities resulting from biases based on gender, ethnicity, income, language and disabilities. Children from the poorest communities and girls are the most likely to lose. One major problem in many developing countries is that school programs are underfinanced and under-sourced, and therefore they fail to deliver good quality education, which leads to dropouts. For example, the 2009 World Development Indicators find that only half of all primary school pupils in Uganda, who start primary grade 1, reach grade 5. Moreover, the survival rate to the last grade (grade 7) as percent of the cohort fell from 39 percent in 2000 to 25 percent in 2004. The situation was mirrored across other African countries.

Reasons for truancy and school dropout of children from poor households are similar across Africa and they include lack of school feeding, supplies and teachers. Other reasons stem from responsibilities at home and pressure to earn additional income. This is worse for girls who face greater pressure to help out in the home, and also face danger from pregnancy or disease from older males in the community who take advantage of them.

At the most basic level, however, African governments (with the help of the donor community) can go a long way in improving school enrollment and retention through school feeding programs. African governments should provide meals to school children from food purchased from the local communities.

In most public schools in Africa, the government does not currently provide meals to pupils. And according to the 2009 State of Uganda Population Report, about 40 percent of deaths among children are due to malnutrition, partly caused by food insecurity. The prevalence of undernourishment in the population was 15 percent in 2005, which is high by any standards. This impedes mental and physical development and impairs cognitive functions. School feeding programs can address undernourishment of children across the board, while encouraging attendance in school and reducing strain at home (less food that families need to provide). The numerous benefits from school feeding include:

1) A source of additional resources to households for consumption and investment (some form of safety net). Money saved from school feeding could lead to added household incomes (higher savings) that may then be invested in productive assets leading to higher returns.

2) An increase in time spent in school through increased enrollment, attendance and decreased dropout rates. A study by the World Food Program in Laos showed through school feeding programs, attendance increased by 5.5 percent per year, enrollment by 16 percent and dropout fell by 9 percent.

3) An increase in cognition and improved learning. According to the World Food Program, school feeding leads to an increase in cognition through test scores and an increase in wages over productive life (Kristjansson et al. 2007).

4) Improved micronutrient status and health; decreased prevalence of intestinal parasites. If children are better nourished they are accordingly less sick, which leads to better quality of life and fewer days of school missed due to illness. Studies also show that one year of additional schooling raises disease awareness (in particular related to HIV) and decreases HIV prevalence by 6.7 percent (De Walque, 2004), leading to longer life expectancy and higher productivity.

5) Multiplicative effects on future productivity and income. A World Bank report shows that every additional year of primary schooling leads to a 5 percent increase in future wages, that is, well-fed children of primary school age are healthier and more productive during their future working years. School feeding also provides multiplicative effects for the community in the form of increased future employment rates (direct and indirect), ready markets for rural famers to supply food for school meals, and increased food production and household savings.

School feeding is a unique safety net driven by the interdependence between various outcomes, and combines short- and long-term benefits from nutrition, education and value transfer. School feeding programs also go far in directly contributing to multiple MDGs in terms of reducing hunger, increasing universal primary education and eliminating gender disparity. As we approach the upcoming MDG summit, developed countries would do well to encourage and support school feeding as part of developing countries’ national strategies.

_________________________________________________

Reference:

Ahmed, A.U. (2004), “The Impact of Feeding Children in School: Evidence from Bangladesh.” Washington DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

De Walque, Damien, (2004), How does the Impact of an HIV/AIDS Information Campaign vary with Educational Attainment? Evidence from Rural Uganda, World Bank 2004.

Kristjansson, E.A., V. Robinson, M. Petticrew, B. MacDonald, J. Krasevec, L. Janzen, T. Greenhalgh, G. Wells, J. MacGowan, A. Farmer, B.J. Shea, A. Mayhew, and P. Tugwell. (2007) School Feeding for Improving the Physical and Psychosocial Health of Disadvantaged Students. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews: 1

World Bank, (2009), Rethinking School Feeding: Social Safety Nets, Child Development, and the Education Sector, Washington DC.

World Food Program 2009, School Feeding: A Sound Investment

World Food Program 2009, Learning from Experience: Good Practices from 45 years of School Feeding

The Millennium Development Goals were set in 2000 to address the needs of the poorest of the poor internationally, from ending poverty to improving child and maternal health. In this week’s @ Brookings podcast, Raj Desai, nonresident senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program, discusses how far we’ve come, and what lies ahead for the ambitious effort.

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The Obama administration’s foreign policy began with a mission to refashion America’s international image and influence. Last week, alongside a speech to the U.N. Summit on the Millennium Development Goals and nearly two years after he was elected, President Obama unveiled a critical component of that effort: his administration’s global development policy. The policy announcement marks a significant and welcome step in advancing a strategy Obama first put forward during his presidential campaign.

While the policy aims to support sustainable development outcomes worldwide, much of the announcement inwardly focused on necessary reform of U.S. governmental systems. It is critically important to modernize the U.S. approach to development and the capacity to successfully support that approach. Additionally, the policy emphasizes support for economic growth by strengthening multilateral capabilities, leveraging non-governmental development actors, coordinating more closely with development partners, and working in better alignment with developing nations’ priorities. With such aims at the core of a new operational model of development support, and with the president’s policy launch timed to coincide with the United Nations review of the MDGs, it seems the U.S. could be setting itself up to once again be the international leader on development issues.

Renewing Multilateral Development Cooperation

U.S. leadership in international development has taken a hit in recent years—largely due to the unilateral (or at best, bilateral) approach that marked the George W. Bush administration’s efforts. Through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the Bush administration worked with Congress to invest heavily in focused, innovative, and results-oriented development programs designed and implemented by the U.S. alone. United States multilateral cooperation sank precipitously as a consequence. Since 2000—even as U.S. development assistance increased nearly 10 percent per year in real terms—the share of foreign assistance channeled through multilateral organizations dropped by more than half (down to 11 percent today compared to an average of 30 percent for other rich countries). Also during this period, the U.S. ceased to be the largest donor to several multilateral development funds. The U.K. surpassed the U.S. in contributions to the International Development Association, the World Bank’s concessional fund for the poorest countries; and in contributions to the African Development Fund, the U.S. now ranks behind the U.K., France and Germany. Beyond lower relative funding to multilateral agencies, the U.S. also implemented its development programs in relative isolation. According to the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee, only 12 percent of U.S. aid missions are effectively coordinated with other donors.

To the extent that the U.S. engaged in broad international dialogue on development cooperation during the Bush administration, it seemed to do so grudgingly. Through Ambassador John Bolton, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations at the time, the Bush administration even sought to excise all references to the MDGs in a 2005 U.N. summit document. At the 2008 High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra, the U.S. could not even agree to be a signatory to the International Aid Transparency Initiative even though transparency is central to U.S. domestic values.

In contrast, the Obama administration’s new policy positions the U.S. to embrace international efforts to promote more effective development, allowing for the opportunity to shape that open dialogue in a way that reflects American values, such as market-driven approaches to growth. Serious, rather than dismissive, treatment of the Millennium Development Goals, for example, gives the U.S. a chance to promote good governance, better measurement of outcomes, sustainability through the development of country systems and other key themes. In his speech at the MDG summit, Obama made a point of noting that broad-based economic growth “turned South Korea from a recipient of aid to a donor of aid.” It so happens that South Korea will host two upcoming meetings that will further test the U.S.’s willingness and ability to influence international development strategies: the upcoming G-20 Summit in November that will debate development issues for the first time, and the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2011.

Also in his speech, the president emphasized scaling up development efforts in places where countries themselves have made good governance and economic development a priority. Without abandoning crisis response and humanitarian relief efforts, Obama has committed to steer the U.S. system to become more selective and deliberately focused, “where we have the best partners and where we can have the greatest impact.” This high-impact approach also has implications for multilateral development cooperation. While the new policy acknowledges the need to “make hard choices about how to allocate attention and resources across countries, regions and sectors,” such decisions invite political costs as certain programs and country missions are closed down in favor of others. However, the policy explicitly includes a commitment to renew U.S. leadership within multilateral development organizations, and widespread multilateral engagement can provide a balance to more narrowly selective and focused bilateral efforts. With greater leadership at the multilateral development banks, the United Nations, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and other multilateral organizations, the U.S. can still influence resources deployed across many countries worldwide while also sharpening its focus on development results.

A Lead Development Agency

A key element of development leadership under Obama’s new policy will be the elevation and strengthening of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The MCC and PEPFAR initiatives of the Bush administration were intentionally established apart from USAID, because the latter was viewed as weak and, in some ways, too broken to fix. That approach to USAID shifted late in Bush’s second term when the administration sought to reform the agency by integrating it into the U.S. State Department. Under Obama’s leadership, USAID’s status has been unclear.

The president’s policy, however, seeks to “reestablish the United States as the global leader on international development” by “rebuilding USAID as the U.S. government’s lead development agency.” This is significant because the White House included 16 different agencies across the bureaucracy to review the U.S. approach to development, which fed into the creation of the new policy. Additionally, in his speech on the MDGs, President Obama emphasized that development policies and strategies are about more than foreign assistance. To be the leader for development, USAID, must be able to guide more than just aid. To do so requires clout, capacity and creativity. If implemented well, the new policy could provide for all three:

• Clout: Rajiv Shah, the leader of USAID, now has an explicit role on the National Security Council. He must promote a strong development viewpoint; and USAID mission directors in embassies and developing country capitals worldwide must be empowered.
  
• Capacity: Given many years of bureaucratic fragmentation of development-related responsibilities and operations across the government combined with severe losses of in-house technical expertise, USAID needs to rebuild. Already, Shah is taking steps in this direction by pushing policy, budget, planning and evaluation capabilities. The president’s approach points toward new “development impact” assessments of policy changes affecting developing countries (such as shifts in trade policy). As it is rebuilt to be the U.S. government’s lead development agency, USAID should augment its capacity to spearhead such assessments.
• Creativity: Tension lies in the combination of renewed multilateral development cooperation and the President’s commitment to making USAID the U.S. government’s lead development agency. An elevated lead development agency should have a more prominent role in affairs concerning multilateral development organizations. This has implications for U.S. policy toward the multilateral development banks, which is led by the U.S. Treasury Department, as well as policy toward the U.N. humanitarian and development agencies, generally guided by the U.S. State Department. Subject to statutory reforms, which may or may not emerge from current Congressional interest in the modernization of development legislation, existing laws establish some of the current divisions of responsibility among agencies. Even so, USAID could take on a bigger role with regard to multilateral development issues not assigned to a different agency by law. In other cases, creative arrangements could emerge unless and until the law changes. For example, working in conjunction with the Treasury Department, USAID could establish closer collaboration with multilateral development banks.

A Bit of Evolution, a Bit of Revolution

In certain ways, the new strategy represents a significant shift in how the U.S. manages its development operations, while in other ways it demonstrates consistency and continuity. Obama is building on the good aspects of his predecessor’s aid programs by: retaining the MCC and its approach to good performers, transparency and measurement; advancing PEPFAR as a dominant component of a results-oriented global health program that is focusing increasingly on sustainable health systems; and ramping up resources and human capital at USAID and the State Department even in a very trying budget environment. Rather than creating new aid institutions to execute new initiatives, the Obama administration is wary of fragmentation and focused instead on strengthening core systems. The strategy also suggests that elements of selectivity, public-private partnership, and an analytically-based results orientation will apply to development aid efforts more broadly. Development’s place in the U.S. national security strategy is similarly more evolution than revolution, as this trend developed in the last administration.

What is more revolutionary, is the clear recognition that U.S. development policy must be about more than aid. Organizationally, alongside its long-term commitment to build up USAID to be the nation’s lead development agency and the world’s premier development agency, the White House has recognized the need to oversee a coherent global development strategy that factors in the broader array of development policy instruments in areas such as trade, investment, migration and agriculture. The administration’s strategy indicates a commitment to a more comprehensive and coherent approach to supporting development outcomes. To the extent that President Obama succeeds in truly elevating USAID in a manner that lasts beyond his tenure, this might also represent a revolution. If the administration’s shift in tone on multilateral cooperation translates into real resources for engagement through such institutions, and through cooperation on the ground, then this too could be a revolution. The degree to which these revolutions succeed through policy implementation will determine whether the U.S. can lead on global development.

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Days after world leaders wrapped up the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Summit, a high-level meeting on Sudan, and the opening of this year’s General Assembly, critical questions remain. What was achieved and where will the United Nations, its agencies and members states go from here?

On September 30, the Managing Global Insecurity Project at Brookings hosted senior U.N. officials Nicholas Haysom and Robert Orr for a discussion of the outcomes and implications of these high-level meetings. Haysom and Orr addressed what these meetings mean for the world’s most pressing challenges, for the future of the United Nations and for further international cooperation on vital global issues. Senior Fellow Bruce Jones, director of the Managing Global Insecurity project, joined the panel.

Senior Fellow Ted Piccone, deputy director for Foreign Policy at Brookings, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion. After the program, the speakers took audience questions.

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• Outcomes from the September Summits at the U.N.

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• 20100930_un_mdg

Participants

The World Economic Forum convening this week in Davos, Switzerland, is organized around the theme of "Shared Norms for the New Reality." As in past years, the conference will feature plenty of debate about how to solve global challenges in a multipolar, interdependent world. This "new reality," however, is getting a little old.

Politicians, commentators and pundits have long opined—in Davos and elsewhere—about the arrival of emerging markets and the shift of economic power away from the West. Indeed, this theme is arguably the leading narrative in geopolitics and economics. The rise of the developing world quite rightly shapes our understanding of investment opportunities, the balance of military power, global governance and more.

Yet on one issue our understanding remains impervious to this new reality: the state of global poverty. Our sense of this topic remains firmly rooted in the year 2005—the last year for which the World Bank has produced data on the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day. Thus we are routinely told that "today," 1.37 billion people around the world are poor, including 456 million in India and 208 million in China, but such figures are six years out of date.

A lot has changed in the past six years. The economies of the developing world have expanded 50 percent in real terms, despite the Great Recession. Moreover, growth has been particularly high in countries with large numbers of poor people. India and China, of course, but also Bangladesh, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Uganda, Mozambique and Uzbekistan—nine countries that were collectively home to nearly two-thirds of the world's poor in 2005—are all experiencing phenomenal economic advances.

In the new Brookings Institution report "Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015," we updated the World Bank's official $1.25-a-day figures to reveal how the global poverty landscape has changed with the emergence of developing countries. We estimate that between 2005 and 2010, nearly half a billion people escaped extreme hardship, as the total number of the world's poor fell to 878 million people. Never before in history have so many people been lifted out of poverty in such a short period. The U.N. Millennium Development Goals established the target of halving the rate of global poverty between 1990 and 2015; this was probably achieved by 2008, some seven years ahead of schedule. Moreover, using forecasts of per capita consumption growth, we predict that by 2015, fewer than 600 million people will remain poor. At that point, the 1990 poverty rate will have been halved and then halved again.

The decline in poverty is happening in all the world's regions and most of its countries, though at varying speeds. The emerging markets of Asia are recording the greatest successes; the two regional giants, China and India, are likely to account for three-quarters of the global reduction between 2005 and 2015. Over this period, Asia's share of the world's poor is anticipated to fall from two-thirds to one-third, while Africa's share is expected to rise to nearly 60 percent. Yet Africa, too, is making advances; we estimate that in 2008 its poverty rate dropped below the 50 percent mark for the first time. By 2015, African poverty is projected to fall below 40 percent, a feat China did not achieve until the mid-1990s.

These findings are likely to surprise many, but they shouldn't. We know that growth lies at the heart of poverty reduction. As the growth of developing countries took off in the new millennium, epitomized by the rise of emerging markets, a massive drop in poverty was only to be expected.

With few exceptions, however, those who care about global development have been slow to catch on to this story. We hear far more about the 64 million people held back in poverty because of the Great Recession than we do about the hundreds of millions who escaped impoverishment over the past six years. While there is good reason to focus public attention on the need to support those still stuck below the poverty line, there is also reason to celebrate successes and to ensure that policy debates are grounded in reality.

When talk at Davos inevitably turns from the haves to the have-nots, participants should avoid falling back on their long-held views. It is time to break our collective cognitive dissonance, by which we exalt the remarkable growth of developing countries while simultaneously bemoaning the intractability of global poverty.

It is customary to bemoan the intractability of global poverty and the lack of progress against the Millennium Development Goals. But the stunning fact is that, gone unnoticed, the goal to halve global poverty was probably reached three years ago.

We are in the midst of the fastest period of poverty reduction the world has ever seen. The global poverty rate, which stood at 25 percent in 2005, is ticking downwards at one to two percentage points a year, lifting around 70 million people – the population of Turkey or Thailand – out of destitution annually. Advances in human progress on such a scale are unprecedented, yet remain almost universally unacknowledged.

Official estimates of global poverty are compiled by the World Bank and stretch back 30 years. For most of that period, the trend has been one of slow, gradual reduction. By 2005, the year of the most recent official global poverty estimate, the number of people living under the international poverty line of $1.25 a day stood at 1.37 billion – an improvement of half a billion compared to the early 1980s, but a long way from the dream of a world free of poverty.

Read the full article at yaleglobal.yale.edu »

Not all international gatherings get the attention they deserve. Next week, governments from around the world will meet in Copenhagen, Denmark to decide on aid levels for the Global Partnership on Education. You probably won’t read about it in the media. The outcomes won’t register in financial markets. But for the millions of children in the world’s poorest countries, this is a summit that matters.

The Global Partnership on Education is the world’s main source of multilateral aid for basic education. Currently housed in the World Bank, but governed through a wider partnership of U.N. agencies, donors, developing country governments and representatives of civil society, it provides grants to countries to support quality universal primary education. Financial commitments made in Copenhagen will set the budget for the next three years.

Crowded as the international development agenda may be, the state of education merits urgent attention. Progress toward the 2015 Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education has slipped in the past few years. With 67 million primary school age children out of school, along with an even greater number of adolescents, the international community needs to act now if the promise of education for all is to be kept alive.

But getting children into school is just one part of the equation. The abysmal state of learning in many countries means that as many as 200 million children will probably leave primary school unable to read, write or do basic math. As highlighted in a recent Brookings report, all of this adds up to a global crisis in learning.

Failure to respond to the learning crisis will have grave consequences. Education is one of the most powerful drivers of progress in areas such as nutrition, child survival and maternal health. It is also an engine of economic growth, innovation and employment creation.

At risk of understatement, the backdrop to the financial replenishment of the Global Partnership on Education is not propitious. Donors have not responded effectively to the global learning crisis and development assistance budgets are under pressure. Aid levels for education in the poorest countries have stagnated at less than $3 billion—far short of the $16 billion needed to achieve the targeted goals. To make matters worse, several bilateral major donors—including the host country, Denmark, as well as the Netherlands, Spain and the United States—are heading to Copenhagen having recently announced cuts in their aid budgets for global education. Meanwhile, the World Bank has allowed International Development Association (IDA) support for primary education in sub-Saharan Africa, the region that has furthest to travel, to fall to just $157 million in fiscal year 2011 (compared to an annual average of $202 million between fiscal years 2005 and 2009)—with 2010 and 2011 primary education financing at the lowest level since 2000-2001.

The agendas of the G-8 and the G-20 are dominated by the ongoing crisis in the euro-zone, recession and global imbalances. Yet the Copenhagen meeting is also an opportunity for donors to step up to the plate, demonstrate leadership and deliver on the education promise made to the world’s poorest children.

So what needs to happen? The Global Partnership for Education has called for commitments of $2.5 billion for its pooled fund, or around $600 million annually, but the response has not been encouraging. While 15 out of 22 donors have accepted the invitation to attend the conference, current estimates indicate that just $1.5 billion will be committed.

The United States is the only G-7 country that does not provide support. Given Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s leadership role on girls’ education and America’s strategic interest in seeing a broad expansion of educational opportunity, this makes little sense. And at least 69 members of the U.S. House of Representatives agree, having sent a letter to Secretary Clinton urging the U.S. to make a strong commitment. France and Germany have provided derisory levels of support to the fund. The United States should offer to come into the Global Partnership as a financial partner with an initial pledge of $375 million over three years, subject to France and Germany making matching pledges. As the current president of the G-20, France should take the lead role in brokering a deal.

The World Bank is also well-placed to provide leadership. Last year, World Bank President Robert Zoellick pledged to increase IDA support for basic education by $750 million annually to 2015. Using the 2008-2010 commitment levels as a benchmark, this implies average IDA spending of around $1.2 billion annually without taking into account any new commitments at Copenhagen. Early signs have not been encouraging. IDA commitments for basic education fell sharply in 2011. According to the World Bank, this reflects a lack of demand from developing country governments. If that is the case, the World Bank should go to Copenhagen with a creative solution for channeling IDA grants through the Global Partnership.

Making a success of the financial replenishment meeting in Copenhagen should be seen as a first step toward a more ambitious global agenda. Recent governance reforms have made the Global Partnership on Education a more effective body. But far more needs to be done. In contrast to the global funds for health, the Global Partnership on Education does not utilize a financing window for the private sector, depriving the partnership of a source of innovation and dynamism. Some of the countries with greatest needs—notably those affected by conflict—are not even covered. And disbursement rates to some countries have been far too slow, although this has been improving.

Looking foward, the Global Partnership for Education needs to demonstrate a real value-added in the aid architecture. It should have an unremitting focus on creating incentives for policies that tackle education inequalities, strengthen learning outcomes and build national capacity. It needs to become a hub for innovation and flexible responses to real problems. And it has to reflect a level of ambition commensurate with the scale of the education challenge. Some commentators argue that this will take more fundamental reforms. Former British prime minister, Gordon Brown, and Australian foreign-minister, Kevin Rudd, have both called for the Global Partnership for Education to be reconstituted as an independent organization, building on the model adopted by the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS and the Global Alliance for Vaccines.

With less than four years to 2015, the Copenhagen meeting should concentrate the minds of donors. A successful replenishment could provide the springboard for a renewed drive toward the education for all goals. Small investments of aid could yield dramatic advances. The question is not so much whether we can afford the investments but rather whether we can afford not to make them.

The World Bank has just issued its latest estimates of global poverty. In 2008, 1.29 billion people lived on less than $1.25 a day (the bank’s global poverty line) while 2.47 billion people lived on less than $2 a day. Poverty is falling across all regions. While expressing caution given the lack of comprehensive data, the World Bank indicated that it has enough information to declare that the first Millennium Development Goal of halving global poverty was met in 2010.

The World Bank’s numbers for country and global poverty matter. They can affect the allocation of aid dollars. They frame the scale of the poverty challenge confronting each country and more broadly the global development community. They define areas of focus: Africa, fragile states and lagging regions in middle-income countries. And they are used to justify funding expansions of the concessional windows of the multilateral banks and capital increases for these aid agencies.
 
Given all this, it is surprising that the empirical basis for country and global poverty numbers is rather weak. Taking the bank’s figures at face value also implies that we have to believe the following:

• North Korea has roughly the same poverty rate as China.
• Individual consumption in India has grown at a paltry 1.5 percent per year since the country’s economic takeoff in the early 1990s, and the much vaunted Indian middle class only numbers 9 million people—in a country with over 900 million cell phone subscribers and 40 million cars. 
• In 1981, China was poorer than any country in the world is today, with a level of individual consumption below the current level in Liberia.

Introduction

The coming three years through 2015 will amount to a crossroads on the path of long-term global cooperation. The challenges will stretch far beyond the unpredictable but urgent daily macroeconomic problems emanating from the advanced economies. They will speak to the principal needs of humanity, affecting billions of the least advantaged people on the planet. Foremost among the challenges stands the fight to end extreme poverty in its many forms. Underpinning this lies the imperative for environmental sustainability. These problems can only be solved through proactive efforts – spanning countries, organizations and citizens.

Ending extreme poverty is not just a matter of charity. Broad-based economic growth in the poorest parts of the world will support the expansion of global markets in all parts of the world. Investments in productive workforces, sustainable food systems and the environment will not only accelerate growth; they will also reduce the risks of costly economic disruptions and social instability.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs, listed for reference in Appendix 1) have been the central reference point for global development efforts since they were established as international targets in 2000. As the first global policy vision based on mutual accountability between developing and developed countries, they set a compelling agenda to cut many forms of extreme poverty in half by 2015. Over time, the Goals have gained traction far beyond the walls of government. Bill Gates has called them “the best idea for focusing the world on fighting global poverty that [he has] ever seen.” Nonetheless, the MDGs have weaknesses to learn from, too. Moreover, they will expire in 2015, and they only mark a midway point.

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The Millennium Development Goals were adopted in 2000 to encourage and monitor global social and economic developments through 2015. This frame has guided international development activities for the past decade and there is now a growing discussion on what the post-2015 international development framework should look like, and how economic, social and environmental pillars of development can be integrated.

On May 2, Global Economy and Development at Brookings hosted a discussion on the purpose of new development goals, the trade-offs in selecting specific indicators and the difficulties in integrating alternative development concepts into a single framework. The discussion also examined how events like the Rio+20 conference in Brazil can be used to advance the U.S. global development agenda. Panelists included Andrew Steer, incoming president, World Resources Institute; David Steven, nonresident fellow, Center for International Cooperation, New York University; Richard Morgan, director of Policy, United Nations Children’s Fund; and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Colin Bradford. Brookings Senior Fellow Homi Kharas, deputy director of Global Economy and Development, moderated the discussion.

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• 02 SDG

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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20120502_sustainable_development

Participants

Amid the economic distress emanating from the United States and Europe, no statistic better captures the broader dynamics of the world economy than the recent World Bank announcement that the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to cut extreme poverty by half was met globally in 2010. This was fully five years before the 2015 deadline.

The United Nations also recently declared that the MDG governing access to drinking water has already been achieved. While many of the world's most prosperous nations are clearly struggling, many of the world's formerly struggling nations are clearly prospering. Asia has played the driving role in catapulting humanity to these overall anti-poverty successes, but the latest figures show poverty on the decline in every region, including sub-Saharan Africa.

Access to education has been improving dramatically too, as have metrics of health and child survival, even if faster progress is still needed to fully meet the corresponding goals by 2015. The MDGs have played a crucial role in advancing many of these global anti-poverty breakthroughs since they were established as targets in 2000. They have shown a remarkably robust political resonance despite an increasingly strained climate for international cooperation. And they have motivated countless people across government, business, academia and civil society to augment their efforts, spawn new innovations and forge creative new partnerships.

But the global landscape has changed dramatically over the past decade and the goals mark only a midpoint in the challenge of extreme poverty. It is time to start thinking about what to do after 2015. This topic will be at the top of the global policy agenda when the UN convenes its Rio+20 conference next month in Brazil. The event aims to launch a new global vision for sustainability, one that accounts for the emerging environmental, economic and social challenges taking shape around the world.

To that end, a proposal has been floated for new "sustainable development goals" to follow and build on the success of the MDGs. It will be tricky to turn this into tangible outcomes. Doing so will require an appreciation of the factors that have made the MDGs a success, including their deadline-driven focus, simplicity, measurability, ambition and emphasis on partnership.

Some colleagues and I, meeting under the auspices of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Benchmarking Progress, have recently written a paper on related issues. We recommend new goals be anchored in an overarching vision of "getting to zero" on extreme poverty everywhere by 2030.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently announced a high-level panel to tackle these questions over the coming year. He named three co-chairmen who will bring an important cross-section of perspectives: Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono leads a middle-income country facing some of the world's most complex interplays of economic, environmental and social pressures; Liberian President and Nobel laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first female head of state, is leading a low-income country's efforts to escape poverty and surmount the legacy of a horrific civil war; Prime Minister David Cameron leads a deficit-strained United Kingdom that has long provided the most prominent MDG leadership among rich economies.

In setting the post-2015 global agenda, Asian voices will have large and growing influence. One reason is realpolitik. A greater share of global income means a greater share of geopolitical voice. A second reason is soft power. When a country makes major progress it provides the influence of inspiration to others. A third factor is more subtle. Many of the fast growing Asian economies are straddling a temporary fence of both receiving and giving international support. They still have significant populations in poverty but also provide ever more skills and resources to promote progress in other countries. They are rejecting old "us" versus "them" paradigms of global development policy, replacing it with a more legitimately inclusive "we".

Any new framework of goals must also recognise that the world increasingly does not wait on governments. We need goals for everyone who wants them. Why not encourage scientific communities, industry sectors and non-government organisations around the world to set their own respective targets in alignment with an overarching vision to sustainably end extreme poverty? Each can have their own piece of the puzzle.

A generation ago, more than two out of five people in the developing world lived on less than US$1.25 (38 baht) a day. Today the number is down to one in five, with Asia leading the way. Let's have everyone help find a way to get it to zero everywhere by 2030.

Despite more children enrolling in school around the world than ever before, education development progress has been uneven and millions of children and youth still do not have access to good quality education. The uneven progress has created a global learning crisis, which is hitting the poorest, most marginalized children and youth particularly hard. Latin America has not been spared in this epidemic. For instance, in Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay, children of parents in the top socioeconomic quartile achieved mathematics scores that are 25 to 30 percent higher than those in the poorest quartile. A recent study in Honduras demonstrated that nearly 30 percent of young people could not read a single word of connected text after two years of school.

Last year, the Center for Universal Education released a report calling for a renewed commitment from all stakeholders to reach the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals for education, while at the same time setting an ambitious post-2015 agenda. This agenda, referred to as the Global Compact on Learning, is a common set of concrete steps that will help developing countries achieve learning for all. To help inform the debates on education globally, the Center for Universal Education has written a new policy guide for the Global Compact on Learning, which is now available in Spanish and Portuguese.

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Documento de Política Traducido Provee un Camino a 2015 y Adelante para la Educación Mundial

Aunque más niños y niñas de todas partes del mundo acceden a la escuela por primera vez que antes, el progreso educativo ha sido desigual y millones de niños, niñas y jóvenes aún no tienen acceso a educación de calidad. El progreso desigual se ha creado un una crisis mundial en materia de aprendizaje, que castiga a los niños, niñas y jóvenes más pobres y marginalizados de una manera particularmente dura. América Latina no se ha librado de esta epidemia. Por ejemplo, en Brasil, México y Uruguay, niños de padres del cuartil socioeconómico más alto de la población logran un puntuación en matemáticas de 25 por cien a 30 por cien más alta que los del cuartil más bajo. Una investigación en Honduras demostró que casi 30 por cien de los jóvenes no pueden leer una sola palabra después de asistir a la escuela por dos años.

El año pasado, el Centro para Educación Universal de Brookings hizo una investigación proponiendo una nueva agenda para vigorizar los esfuerzos internacionales en educación, alcanzar los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio de ONU y Educación para Todos de UNESCO, y establecer una ambicioso política de post-2015 para la educación. Esta agenda es lo que llamamos el Pacto Mundial sobre el Aprendizaje, un conjunto común de objetivos políticos y medidas concretas que ayudarán a los países en vía de desarrollo a alcanzar aprendizaje para todos. Para informar los debates en educación global, el Centro para la Educación Universal escribió una guía de política del Pacto Mundial sobre el Aprendizaje que ahora está disponible en español y portugués.

Guias de Política traduzidos apresentam o caminho a percorrer na educação até 2015 e os anos que seguem*

Apesar de o número de crianças matriculadas na escola ser maior do que nunca por todo o mundo, o progresso do desenvolvimento da educação têm sido muito desigual e há milhões de crianças e jovens que ainda não têm acesso a educação de qualidade. Este progresso desigual criou uma crise global de aprendizagem, que atinge, de forma particularmente difícil, os mais pobres, as crianças mais marginalizadas e jovens. A América Latina não tem sido poupada neste fenómeno. Por exemplo, no Brasil, México e Uruguai, os resultados atingidos em Matemática são entre 25 e 30 % mais elevados na franja de alunos cujos pais são de classe socioeconómica mais elevada do que na franja de alunos de classes mais baixas. Um estudo recente nas Honduras demonstrou que quase 30 % dos jovens, dois anos depois de dois anos de escola, não sabiam ler uma única palavra do texto usado no estudo.

No ano passado, o Center for Universal Education at Brookings produziu um relatório que apela à renovação do compromisso das partes interessadas para o alcance das metas de Educação para Todos e dos Objetivos de Desenvolvimento do Milénio que abordam as questões da educação. Ao mesmo tempo, esse relatório estabelece uma ambiciosa agenda pós-2015. O Pacto Global sobre o Aprendizado, é um documento com um conjunto de medidas concretas que podem ajudar os países em desenvolvimento a garantir a aprendizagem de todos. Para que este documento possa ser um contributo para os debates sobre educação por todo o mundo, o Center for Universal Education redigiu um novo guia de política para o Pacto Global sobre Aprendizagem, que agora está disponível em Espanhol e Português.

*The Portuguese version was translated by Andreia Soares at the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the Global Monitoring Report recently released new numbers for out of school children. According to the data, 61 million children of primary school age were not in school in 2010. At first glance, this seems like an improvement over the 67 million kids reported out of school in 2009. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

If you take a look at the footnotes, you find that UNESCO used new UN Population Division data to calculate the number of out-of-school children.  Using the new calculations, UNESCO had previously revised the 2009 statistic down to 61 million. While we should be outraged that we are only able to analyze education statistics that are two years out-of-date, we should be more outraged about what this says about our commitment to education: it is stagnating and declining.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by governments and donors. There have been countless hours of meetings at the global, regional and local levels on education. And new policies, strategies and plans have been worked and reworked. Yet, 61 million children are out still of primary school. While the global number indicates that we may have made no progress from 2009-2010, regional numbers show an even worse story. While countries in South and West Asia have steadily decreased their out-of-school population over the last 20 years, in sub-Saharan Africa, increases in enrollment have not matched population growth. The number of out of school children has increased from 29 million to 31 million over the last three years, indicating that we are in fact moving in reverse.

With increasing youth populations and no prospects for a significant increase in resources under the current status quo, we are far off course for meeting even a basic development goal by 2015: getting all children into school.  At his speech at Brookings on Wednesday, former President Bill Clinton stated, “No country can work itself out of poverty with aid alone." Education is everyone's responsibility— it's time for everyone to step up to the plate. The global community as a whole must prioritize education before the situation gets even worse.

INTRODUCTION

These are important times for how the world manages the annual flow of around $200 billion in development cooperation assistance to developing countries. A number of changes in global international development cooperation are in the offering: within a one month span, development issues will be taken up by the G-20 at the Leaders’ Summit at Los Cabos, by the United Nations at its Rio+20 Summit, and by Jim Kim upon taking over as the first ever development professional to become president of the World Bank. The key issues on the table are implementation of the Millennium Development Goals, building consensus on a new set of post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, implementing a New Deal on fragile states, and closer integration of environmental, security, trade, investment and development agendas.

There is now an opportunity to establish a new paradigm and governance structure for coordinating the many state and non-state actors engaged in development cooperation. A new Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation is taking shape, backstopped by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Establishing this partnership was one of the key outcomes of the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held in December 2011.

On June 28-29, 2012, the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness, a DAC-supported international partnership for aid effectiveness, will hold a plenary meeting in Paris which should conclude with three consequential outcomes: (i) it will bring into being a new Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation with a governance structure that truly reflects the multi-stakeholder nature of development today; (ii) it will dissolve itself, marking one of the first times that a multilateral structure is actually replaced by a more suitable mechanism; and (iii) it will adopt a set of indicators for monitoring global progress towards more effective development cooperation.

Already, the outlines of the new partnership are becoming clear, thanks to a transparent process of meetings and dialogue. There is much to be encouraged about, but as with most efforts for institutional change, the devil is in the details. At first glance, while the Global Partnership promises to deliver substantial and significant improvements in governance, its proposed new monitoring indicators are still rooted in the past and do not reflect the new style of development cooperation that is expected in the next decade. This policy paper explores the approach to building indicators and suggests improvements to ensure better development cooperation.

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Pundits are not policymakers and they should not be held to the same standard of public responsibility. But opinion leaders do need to take responsibility for their role in shaping public debate and, at times, contributing to policy failure. I was reminded of this last week when reading one of Jeffrey Simpson’s Globe and Mail columns, in which he lamented Canadian foreign aid cuts and asserted that the country’s “once-sterling reputation for caring about Africa is over.”

Rewind the clock to June 2005, when Canada had a brief, once-in-a-generation public discussion on its foreign assistance strategy, especially for Africa. It was the eve of the historic Gleneagles G8 Summit, hosted by then-U.K. prime minister Tony Blair. The Martin government was riding a knife edge in deliberating whether to join other advanced economies, such as the U.K. and the rest of Europe, in committing a fair share of the global financing required to tackle global problems such as AIDS, malaria, and food insecurity.

Fair share was defined as a timetable to achieve the international aid target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income by 2015, the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals. After missing multiple natural policy moments to commit to 0.7 over the previous year, the government was in a last-minute scramble finally to decide before Gleneagles. Many Ottawa decision-makers were new to foreign aid issues and eager to be perceived as hard-headed. At the time I was managing the UN Millennium Project and tracked the situation closely.

During the final critical days of deliberations, Simpson wrote an influential column that helped tip the scales when it accused aid advocates of fiscal naivety. “By all means,” he wrote, “let Canada raise its foreign aid to 0.7. … Remember, however, that such a commitment would eat up just about all available federal money for the next decade. … Forget, therefore, more federal money for provinces, daycare, the homeless, tax cuts, postsecondary education, research, aboriginals or anything else. … There wouldn’t be anything left.”

Thus one of Canada’s most trusted voices misleadingly framed 0.7 as a choice between global disease control and Canadian day care. Absent was a discussion of Canada’s responsibilities toward the Millennium Development Goals. Nor was there mention of the cost of hypocrisy, since Martin had already endorsed 0.7 as finance minister at a landmark 2002 UN conference and his successor minister Ralph Goodale had endorsed the target in March 2005 as a member of the Blair-led Commission for Africa.

Days later, at the G8 summit, Canada said a final no to 0.7. The faux hard-headedness struck a two-fold blow to the country’s international political capital. First, many in the global policy community had believed Martin could be trusted to provide leadership on this issue and felt let down when he did not. Second, Canada is generally considered the “home of 0.7” since the target first took hold globally following an international commission chaired by Lester Pearson in 1969. It is extra costly when a national progenitor is seen as failing to follow through.

In fairness, Simpson had changed tune by a December 2005 column, where he probed, “When the world asked for commitments to deliver 0.7 per cent of GDP for foreign aid, where was Canada?” In March 2010 he later bemoaned Canada’s global aid laggard status as part of the country’s ability to tackle its problems partly on the back of the world’s poor. But where was that Jeffrey Simpson in early 2005?

Fast-forward to 2012 and the U.K. continues to lead by example on 0.7, despite a much worse fiscal situation than Canada’s. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron realizes that 0.7 is not just a good investment in humanity, it is also good politics. The UN Secretary General recently announced a high-level panel to propose global development goals and strategy for a post-2015 world. Cameron is one of three co-chairs, along with the Nobel laureate President of Liberia and the President of Indonesia. The U.K. has earned its oar in the water.

Canada’s politicians should be held responsible for the country’s multi-partisan failure to lead on international development, but ultimately they follow the evolution of public discussions much more than they create them. At a deeper level, Canada has suffered a failure of public deliberation. This can only be solved through active long-term leadership from public voices of all types. Leaders from media, academia, and the private sector need to step up alongside the traditional voices of non-governmental organizations.

It typically takes years for public discourses to take shape around specific issues and serious facts. They need to advance in step with technical debates. What, for example, should Canada’s role be in protecting the remarkable achievements of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria? How should Canada engage on international efforts for girls’ secondary education, or for smallholder farm productivity? How can Canadian businesses and researchers best contribute to post-2015 global development goals if the country’s climate policy is out of sync with global norms?

It will likely be some time before Canada is ready for another high-profile discussion of major aid increases. That does not diminish the importance of proactive and rigorous debate on underlying global issues in the meantime. To avoid long-term echoes of “where was Canada when the world came calling?” opinion leaders should take more responsibility for tackling the substance today.

Editor's Note: The "Scaling up in Agriculture, Rural Development and Nutrition" publication is a series of 20 briefs published by the International Food Policy Research Institute. To read the full publication, click here.

Taking successful development interventions to scale is critical if the world is to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and make essential gains in the fight for improved agricultural productivity, rural incomes, and nutrition. How to support scaling up in these three areas, however, is a major challenge. This collection of policy briefs is designed to contribute to a better understanding of the experience to date and the lessons for the future.

Scaling up means expanding, replicating, adapting, and sustaining successful policies, programs, or projects to reach a greater number of people; it is part of a broader process of innovation and learning. A new idea, model, or approach is typically embodied in a pilot project of limited impact; with monitoring and evaluation, the knowledge acquired from the pilot experience can be used to scale up the model to create larger impacts. The process generally occurs in an iterative and interactive cycle, as the experience from scaling up feeds back into new ideas and learning.

The authors of the 20 policy briefs included here explore the experience of scaling up successful interventions in agriculture, rural development, and nutrition under five broad headings: (1) the role of rural community engagement, (2) the importance of value chains, (3) the intricacies of scaling up nutrition interventions, (4) the lessons learned from institutional approaches, and (5) the experience of international aid donors.

There is no blueprint for when and how to take an intervention to scale, but the examples and experiences described in this series of policy briefs offer important insights into how to address the key global issues of agricultural productivity, food insecurity, and rural poverty.