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As the Millennium Development Goals’ expiration date of 2015 approaches, groups around the world have proposed various frameworks and priorities as the basis for the future global development agenda. Club de Madrid, an independent nonprofit organization composed of the world´s largest collection of former heads of state and government, has advanced a “shared societies” perspective for the post-2015 development agenda, which argues that the inclusion of all segments of society, especially marginalized identity groups should serve as a foundation for the new global development goals.  

On February 7, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings will convene a high-level panel to discuss how social inclusion should fit into the post-2015 development agenda. Panelists will include Club of Madrid members: Kim Campbell, former prime minister of Canada; Wim Kok, former prime minister of the Netherlands; and Cassam Uteem, former president of Mauritius. They will be joined by Santiago Levy, vice president for Sectors and Knowledge at the Inter-American Development Bank and John Podesta, a former member of the High-level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. Brookings Senior Fellow Homi Kharas will moderate the discussion.

After the program, the panelists will take audience questions. 

Join our discussion during the event using #SharedSocieties.

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There is a natural link between the post-2015 United Nations development goals process and the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation ministerial meeting that will take place in Mexico City, April 15-16. The efforts are complementary, but they are being pursued on separate tracks and with a different set of actors. Those attending the ministerial meeting in Mexico are charged directly with implementing the development agenda. They are ministers of development, planning or finance, and civil society and private sector representatives engaged in development cooperation. Their common purpose has had the effect of reducing the political tension that often accompanies other international meetings. Every effort should be made to transfer this intangible goodwill to the debate surrounding the post-2015 global development goals.

The post-2015 development goals continue to be hotly debated by foreign ministry representatives in New York and in capitals around the world. Last year, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon set the stage for the debate by creating a high-level panel (HLP) of political leaders, including three heads of government who chaired the group. The HLP made what is thus far the most important contribution to the debate. The panel’s diverse membership reaffirmed the contribution of the original eight Millennium Development Goals, improved and added to the list, and recommended a multi-layered approach that placed primary responsibility at the country level. The panel tackled the inequality issue by recommending that results measurement always include the lowest quadrant of the population. The report touched the most important of the bases, from poverty reduction to fragility to gender and the roles of civil society and the private sector.

The political challenge the HLP confronted was immense and predictably criticism was heard just after the report was made public. Some argued that despite the innovative proposal on inequality the issue was not given sufficient attention. Others wanted more comprehensive treatment of gender and environmental issues.

Still, what is remarkable is that a group of very diverse political leaders could achieve full consensus. Not only did they agree, they also performed the remarkable feat of writing a report that did not look like it was drafted by a committee.

This report could well be the high-water mark as the debate among the political factions of the United Nations continues unabated. In the words of one close observer, a lack of trust in New York is causing the debate to descend to a political tussle over poverty—“whose fault is it and who pays?”

Despite this contentious ideological debate conducted by officials whose knowledge of development cooperation is marginal, there remains cause for optimism. The universal goals for development created at the turn of the millennium have focused the development mission and created an important rationale for increased official development assistance (ODA). It would be difficult to imagine a world with no agreed-upon goals. Accountability in the development field is here to stay, and this is where the Global Partnership’s effectiveness agenda has made its most important contribution.  

This agenda was given a large boost by 162 governments, international organizations, civil society and the private sector in Busan, Korea in 2011. The Global Partnership since then has been meeting in the form of a steering committee chaired by Nigerian Finance Minister N’Gozi Okonjo-Iweala, United Kingdom Secretary of State for Development Justine Greening and Indonesian Development Minister Armeda Alisjahbana. These leaders and a committee composed of developing country partners, traditional donors, new providers of “south-south” cooperation, civil society, parliamentarians and the private sector have done the planning for the Mexico ministerial.

The Mexico City meeting is part of a series that started in Rome in 2003. Subsequent meetings in Paris (2005), Accra (2008) and Busan (2011) created an ever-stronger set of principles related to the effectiveness of development interventions. As time has gone on, the donor profile at these meetings has receded as partner nations in the developing world began participating in large numbers and with growing intensity. They now fully embrace concepts initially conceived of in Paris in 2005, such as ownership, mutual accountability, transparency and results measurement. In Busan, the emerging economies (Brazil, China and India in particular)—new providers of assistance in the south-south context—came to the table and agreed on “shared principles.” Civil society organized as never before and, along with representatives of the private sector, became more than just activists. They became active members of the negotiation team for the Busan outcome document.

Trust is not an easy commodity to create on the international stage and it has taken over a decade of intense work to create the partnership that is the basis for the success of this forum. It would be premature to suggest that the Global Partnership has been permanently institutionalized, but the Mexico ministerial will be a good first test of that proposition.

There will be voices heard at the UN in New York from member state representatives reflecting foreign ministry views that the Global Partnership is not legitimate as it is not a UN institution. They are technically correct. The Global Partnership was originally conceived by those OECD donors who were members of the Development Assistance Committee. However, a concerted effort was made to overcome the legalities and to produce an entity that was widely accepted. the partnership’s earlier meetings were planned by a working group made up of key partners, including the UN, the World Bank, partner countries, civil society, the private sector and developing country governments. In the end game leading to Busan, new providers such as Brazil, China and India participated in the drafting of the outcome document. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) is now part of the secretariat for the Partnership. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and UNDP Administrator Helen Clark were both in Busan and both are scheduled to be in Mexico City as well. The legitimacy issue has not thus far constrained participation in any way.

The planning for Mexico City has been ambitious and it reflects intense participation by developing country partners. Two of the plenary sessions—domestic resource mobilization and illicit flows—reflect a very healthy trend toward self-sufficiency and away from dependency. Tax revenues comprise a growing proportion of the economies of developing countries. The average tax revenue as a percentage of GDP for low income countries is 13 percent and for middle income countries 22 percent. In developmental states—states whose primary public policy thrust is development—domestic resource mobilization through efficient tax systems is increasing exponentially while ODA is decreasing as a percentage of GDP.

Recapturing illicit flows is a major objective of Nigerian Finance Minister N’Gozi Ojonko-Iweala, a cause she took up initially at the World Bank. In the very first meeting of the steering committee, she said that developing country resources sent by corrupt leaders to Western banks had been estimated at between $3 billion and $4 billion (recent studies indicate that the amount may be twice that). . Domestic banking laws are protecting these ill-gotten gains, and thus the effort to overcome these laws represents an important part of the policy coherence for development challenge.  Some progress has been made in tracking these illicit funds, but gaining the release of these resources would compensate in some small part for the reductions in ODA we have seen in the past three years.

The Mexican government has promoted a session on the particular challenges faced by middle-income countries where poverty remains prevalent. ODA flows to these countries have decreased, but poverty and inequality persist. Many of these governments are both providers and recipients of ODA. While they are increasingly accepting a development-cooperation responsibility, particularly in their region, they remain reluctant to further define their specific responsibilities and understandably concerned that calling attention to their provider role will create internal political issues. They are looking for explicit partnerships with donors that will enable an effective effort to reduce poverty at home.

Sessions on the increasing number of triangular projects involving traditional donors, new providers and partner countries reflect a willingness to work beyond the old north-south boundaries. “Knowledge sharing,” a key aspect of an increasingly sophisticated definition of the south-south model, will also be a central topic for the agenda. The ministerial will focus, as did the UN High Level Panel, on “inclusive development,” possibly presenting a new “Framework for Inclusive Development Partnerships” that involves governments at all levels, civil society, the private sector and donors.

These topics reflect the interests and the commitments of partner countries to the Global Partnership. It is this intense participation by the low and middle-income governments that has made participation by the so-called “new providers”—the China, India, Brazil, and others like them—so attractive. This is a forum where traditional donors, new providers and partner countries can discuss their programs, policies and approaches in a non-threatening environment. These countries participate actively not because OECD donors ask them to, but rather because their south-south partners want them there. In this regard, the leadership being shown by Mexico as the host country is vitally important.

One of the most compelling aspects of the ministerial will be the presentation of a monitoring survey that will show evidence of countries’ progress or failure to meet obligations undertaken in the Busan outcome document. This survey has involved about 50 developing governments and the traditional donors, both bilateral and multilateral. The presentation of this survey will provide a platform to call for accelerated progress, a higher level of ambition or for action to overcome bottlenecks where they exist. It will also credit donors who have shown real leadership in both the quantity and the quality of the assistance they provide.

This type of survey is an essential accountability tool. The Busan outcome document represents a voluntary commitment, often called a “soft-law” approach. The only way to assure compliance is to publically shame those who have shirked their responsibilities. And as most of the specific commitments were undertaken at Busan by the traditional donors, a willingness to participate in a survey that could expose deficiencies builds trust among the other partners. That is, of course, if those deficiencies are not too prominent. Certainly, donors will hear many concerns about reductions in the overall amount of ODA.

A very explicit “Guide to the Monitoring Framework of the Global Partnership” has been promulgated by the secretariat and each of the indicators and targets is described in detail. According to those involved in the planning, there will be an effort to extrapolate from the findings and to incorporate evidence related to “inclusive development partnerships,” “results,” “transparency and accountability,” “country ownership” and “fragility and conflict” in the outcome document.

Mexico City will also see a major push to confirm the private sector as a partner in development. The premise for this important consensus was built at Busan where over 45 business associations participated to express their willingness to create a new partnership with development agencies and partner governments. Developing nations embraced this initiative. The purpose of this agenda in Mexico will be to break down the silos further to enhance the dialogue among governments, businesses and civil society. This will hopefully lead to further innovations in financing investment, particularly in low-income countries where the risk is highest.

Lastly, the steering committee chairs will present their ideas for strengthening the relationship between the committee and the key constituencies that make up the partnership. The committee now has 18 members, but there is concern that key constituencies are left out. There is a tentative agreement to expand membership to 24, which will allow positions for Arab donors, another African member and a labor union representative. The three co-chairs will step aside and there seems to be interest in assuring that at least one be replaced by a representative of the next host country. Korea has offered to hold a meeting of an expanded committee each year between ministerials. This will in itself improve communications. The steering committee will be expected to exercise more substantive leadership and to concern itself less with process, a matter better left to the secretariat. What is encouraging is that this discussion goes to the heart of the institutionalization of the Global Partnership.

It was my hope that when the Global Partnership was created it would become the central institution among all others in the development community. The global development challenge will require better coordination among all the constituencies and this forum more than any other has the potential to play that role. There is also a need to strengthen the capacity of the UNDP and OECD secretariat and resources will be needed for that.

Let us hope that the Mexico City ministerial will live up to our aspirations. If it does, it will not only institutionalize a vitally important global forum, it also will positively influence the UN effort to conceive and endorse development goals for 2015 and beyond.

Every so often, we have an “international day” to focus attention on something we otherwise take for granted (or forget). So we have days to remind us of the importance of thinking about happiness, tuberculosis, malaria, autism, wildlife, press freedom, mother earth, migratory birds and more. Among the list of 132 days officially recognized by the United Nations is International Women’s Day on March 8.

At one level it seems strange to have a “day” for women. Do we risk forgetting them on all other days? Do we need a special reminder about their importance? Ridiculous as it may seem in the 21st century, the answer—as far as global development is concerned—is yes.

Twenty years ago, in 1994, then-chief economist at the World Bank Larry Summers wrote, “investment in girls’ education may well be the highest return investment available in the developing world.” The benefits he ascribed to improving girls’ education come in the form of lowered fertility rates, improved household nutrition, lowered infant, child and maternal mortality, as well as increased economic growth and competitiveness. Better educated women have higher labor force participation rates. When they work outside the home, they tend to marry later, reduce household economic dependency ratios and increase household saving.

In fact, gender equity should be a universal agenda, applicable to all countries, not just developing economies. For example, in the United States, our colleagues at the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution have identified mothers’ education as a key indicator of future success on the income ladder. 

There has been some progress in gender equity around the world, especially in terms of women’s political participation. There is rough gender parity in access to health and education. But the gender gap is large for economic indicators, and the pace of narrowing it appears to have stalled. The World Economic Forum’s 2013 Gender Gap Report concludes that the larger the gender gap, the lower is global competitiveness at the country level. This is not surprising. It restates what has been said in the2004 World Development Report and has long been known: “misallocating women’s skills and talent comes at a high (and rising) economic cost.”

Globally, men are 50 percent more likely to work than women, and this figure is far higher in some countries. Women get lower pay—receiving on average 15 percent less in wages than men do for equivalent jobs in advanced economies.  Yet too little attention is paid to these issues, and they are often dismissed as “cultural”—something that is hard if not impossible to change over time.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Women, too, respond to economic incentives. Women face unfair discrimination, tax, and labor regulations in the form of lower wages, higher marginal tax rates as household incomes rise and limited flexibility on part-time work, respectively. But these are subject to change. Chile, for one, increased the labor force participation of women from 36 percent in 2000 to 49 percent by 2011. The female labor force participation rate in Pakistan (24 percent) is much closer to that in India (29 percent), than in Bangladesh (57 percent), despite the shared Islamic cultures of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Far more needs to be done to promote gender equality worldwide. As Esther Duflo has emphasized, women’s empowerment and economic growth are closely interconnected. In the best case,  virtuous cycles can be created wherein economic growth and poverty reduction can beget reduced discrimination, and women’s empowerment can generate economic growth and reduce poverty. Growth policies and gender equity policies can reinforce each other. This is why the United Nations High-Level Panel Report on the Post-2015 Development Agenda stresses the need for a stand-alone goal on empowering girls and women, a goal that should address not just the discrimination faced by women in all facets of daily life, including access to health and education, but also the broader issues of  personal safety, the end of child marriage and the legal rights to own and inherit property, to sign a contract, to register a business and to open a bank account.

Finally, gender equity targets must be considered alongside other targets on achieving growth and having in place the building blocks for sustained prosperity for all. Without these other aspects, gender equity cannot succeed. Surprisingly, the development community continues to look at gender as if it were somehow different from development. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee finds that 30 percent of aid goes for projects and programs where gender concerns are a principal or significant objective. It is time to simply consider gender equity and development as two sides of the same coin, rather than focusing on one without regard for the other.  As Amartya Sen would put it, what is development if not the expansion of freedoms for everyone? We should celebrate when there is no longer a need for an International Women’s Day, and we should talk about and act on gender issues even when it is no longer International Women’s Day!

Last week, at the Countdown to 2015 Summit in Washington, DC, “The Education We Want: An Advocacy Toolkit” was launched, featuring real-life stories of youth who have successfully advocated for expanding national education programs to reach the most marginalized children and youth. The toolkit outlines practical steps in a user-friendly and engaging format to help youth carry out their own advocacy campaigns. As part of a final push to get all children into school by 2015, the Youth Advocacy Group (YAG)—a group of young leaders from around the world who have been working to strengthen momentum for global education as part of the UN secretary-general’s Global Education First Initiative (GEFI)—will disseminate the toolkit to youth around the globe. Their plans also include staging youth “takeovers” of governments worldwide, following up on their successful Malala Day UN Youth Takeover on July 12, 2013.

With the sunset of the current Millennium Development Goals in 2015, the many stakeholders working on global education issues are focused on two things: 1) delivering on the promise of universal primary education, and 2) simultaneously ensuring that universal access plus quality teaching and learning are part of the next global development framework. The voices of youth have been critical in these debates, in no small part due to the leadership of the YAG.

The YAG youth demonstrate remarkable passion, leadership skills, and eloquence when speaking about the barriers to quality education in their communities and in the world. Their ability to apply diverse skills—including so-called 21st century skills such as collaboration, problem-solving, digital literacy, and creativity—to the major challenges facing our world is the quintessence of what it means to be a “global citizen.” In fact, the Youth Advocacy Group is co-convening a Global Citizenship Working Group along with UNESCO and the Center for Universal Education here at Brookings to dig deeper into what it means to be a global citizen and how education programs can foster and track these skills and values, which is one of the three GEFI priorities. Defining and tracking the competencies related to being a “citizen of the world” was also one of the recommendations of the Learning Metrics Task Force (LMTF).

There is now an opportunity to include global citizenship education in the post-2015 development agenda as part of the knowledge, skills, and competencies that all learners require in the 21st century. However, there is currently a lack of consensus about what skills and values constitute global citizenship. There is also much debate on the terminology used to describe these competencies, as the term “citizenship” is usually associated with a political entity. However, some important groundwork has already been done by UNESCO and the LMTF.

Through meetings on this topic by UNESCO, the following core competencies have emerged as likely outcomes of global citizenship education:

• knowledge and understanding of specific global issues and trends, and knowledge of and respect for key universal values (e.g., peace and human rights, diversity, justice, democracy, caring, non‐discrimination, tolerance);
• cognitive skills for critical, creative and innovative thinking, problem‐solving, and decision‐making;
• non‐cognitive skills, such as empathy, openness to experiences and other perspectives, interpersonal/communicative skills, and aptitude for networking and interacting with people of different backgrounds and origins; and
• behavioral capacities to launch and engage in proactive actions.

The LMTF also discussed this topic with education ministries, teachers, civil society actors, and other stakeholders  and these conversations revealed a similar set of competencies with an additional emphasis on climate change, environmental awareness, leadership and digital literacy. 

Based on the results of these consultations and a review of existing efforts—together with the LMTF’s recommended seven domains of learning—the global citizenship working group that YAG, CUE and UNESCO are convening will work over the next year to build consensus on the core competencies of global citizenship. Members of the Youth Advocacy Group in particular expressed an interest in shaping how learning related to global citizenship is assessed. However, they cautioned that the traditional ways of testing may not be appropriate for measuring global citizenship and could stifle innovation and creativity. In this absence of reliable measurement tools, there is an opportunity to move beyond traditional methods and redefine how learning is measured in the context of global citizenship. This includes looking at new ways of measurement that are more engaging to children and youth, including through technology. Without a collective effort on measurement by the actors involved in global citizenship education, the education community risks having a continued focus on testing and learning of only cognitive or academic skills, such as reading and numeracy.

The working group process will include: exploring the different definitions and competencies related to global citizenship; identifying ways in which these competencies are currently measured, with an emphasis on educational outcomes; building consensus on core competencies of global citizenship that are relevant in all countries; and proposing new and innovative ways of assessing learning in this area.

The Youth Advocacy Group is well-positioned to lead the conversation among youth on this complex topic, as the success of the project is dependent on their energy, innovative spirit, and willingness to tackle the most difficult problems of our time.

The deadline for applications to join the Global Citizenship Working Groupis being extended to April 22, 2014.

This week in Colombo, Sri Lanka, over 1,500 people are convening from around the world for the World Conference on Youth. Over half of attendees will be young people themselves, and all will share ideas, experiences and innovative approaches for effectively contributing to the next global development agenda. Ultimately, the delegates will produce an action plan that spells out youth priorities for the post-2015 development agenda.

This active engagement of youth and their priorities is a positive development since the last time development goals were considered. In 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on education focused almost exclusively on the issue of universal access to primary education. Since then, however, the international community has rallied around the need to address not just school attendance, but also the challenges around quality and equity in education.

These challenges are intensified by the frightening figures regarding the global learning crisis, a youth skills-shortage and unemployment—250 million children primary school-aged children lack basic skills and 73 million youth are out of work. With these urgent statistics in mind, U.N. agencies, civil society groups and governments have begun working on more nuanced post-2015 development goals, ones that consider the foundational questions about the value, purpose and relevance of education. In doing so, initiatives and researchers are placing greater emphasis on the notion that education isn't just about building a skilled workforce, but also about cultivating active and responsible citizens; that teaching isn't just a matter of presenting facts but instilling skills, attitudes and awareness in students that facilitate peace and tolerance and enable the international collaboration needed to solve global challenges. This concept, central to the U.N. secretary-general’s Global Education First Initiative (GEFI), has been branded as education for global citizenship.

Alongside the Center for Universal Education and UNESCO, the GEFI Youth Advisory Group (YAG) is working to establish international consensus on a definition of education for global citizenship, explore best teaching practices, and develop a framework for measuring the impact of global citizenship education. Specifically, the YAG is leading a series of global youth consultations, which will actively engage the key stakeholders in education: young people themselves. During the YAG's inaugural consultation on education for global citizenship this week in Sri Lanka, delegates from every corner of the world and from a wide variety of marginalized groups will have an honest and insightful conversation about identity, cultural understanding, conflict, sustainability, human rights and values.

It is good timing for these discussions. Two important documents containing post-2015 education targets are being debated this month, and clarity around global citizenship education is needed in these discussions: the inter-governmental Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) working document of revised SDG focus areas, including an education goal and targets, and the Education for All (EFA) Steering Committee’s Joint Proposal on Education Post-2015. Both documents focus on an education goal that strives for quality education and lifelong learning for all, and there are considerable overlaps between many of the targets, including on early childhood education; completion of free quality, basic education (primary and secondary), including achieving relevant learning outcomes; adult literacy; and youth and adult skills. While each report contains a target that could fit into an education for global citizenship category, the OWG target focuses on “integrating relevant knowledge and skills in education curricula, including information and communications technology skills, education for sustainable development, and awareness raising on culture's contribution to sustainable development,” while the EFA target requires that learners “acquire knowledge, skills, values and attitudes for global citizenship and sustainable development.” The consensus-building activities that the YAG are engaged in with partners are critical to distilling these targets into one that is meaningful and actionable for the education and sustainable development communities, both at global and national levels.

The UN secretary-general and members of the OWG have repeatedly stated the importance of hearing from voices at the country level in the post-2015 discussions. A recent statement submitted to OWG members in support of a stand-alone education goal with a strong focus on equitable learning, including highlighting the area of global citizenship education, and endorsed by over 218 organizations, national education coalitions, and foundations from all regions of the world, did just that. The YAG is using its members’ wide-reaching expertise and engaging with their many partners to place young people’s voices at the heart of the post-2015 consultations. By moderating three major online consultations on post-2015 education, and facilitating a global consultation in Sri Lanka this week with the U.N. special envoy on youth, they are helping provide the platform for youth to make tangible change. The YAG is galvanizing marginalized children and youth to be outspoken advocates against their plight. As they stand united calling passionately for change and justice, it will prove just too difficult for governments to ignore.

This week more than 600 delegates, including over 50 government ministers, donor agencies, civil society and the private sector are descending on Brussels to cast their vote of support for the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). The GPE is requesting $3.5 billion to replenish its fund for the 2015-2018 period, and gather pledges from developing countries to increase their own education spending.  In preparation for this meeting we decided this would be a good time to reflect on GPE’s journey in recent years; on progress made and remaining weaknesses, and what to look for in this week’s proceedings.    

The Global Partnership for Education was established in 2002 as the Education for All Fast Track Initiative (FTI), and is the only dedicated multilateral partnership focused on education. Its mission is to “galvanize and coordinate a global effort to deliver good quality education to all girls and boys, prioritizing the poorest and most vulnerable.” It is designed to strengthen national education plans, improve aid effectiveness, coordinate donor support and galvanize financing for education. It does this through a partnership of developing country governments, donor agencies, civil society organizations and private organizations—aiming to make the whole add up to more than the sum of its parts. The High-Level Panel on the post-2015 Development Agenda identified sector specific multi-stakeholder partnerships like GPE as essential to the achievement of any new post-2015 development agenda, as they can bring about much needed change in mindsets about pressing global issues.

Four years ago, an extensive evaluation of the GPE (the midterm review of the then-FTI), exposed many crippling problems and concluded that it was a weak partnership, with weak accountability, and did not deliver on its goals. It found that FTI was overly focused on the “finance gap” model, and ignored gaps in capacity, data collection and monitoring and evaluation.

Today, the Global Partnership looks very different from the FTI of four years ago.  We reflect on progress against five major goals the organization has set out for itself over the last four years, including reform goals formulated in the midterm evaluation and goals set out one year ago in Brussels by the new CEO.  We conclude that progress has been made in a number of areas and that the pace of change has been accelerating more recently.  It has taken steps to mobilize more resources, better balance need and performance in country allocations, develop a deeper partnership, monitor results and improve program delivery on the ground.

In many ways the organization, despite its existence for over a decade, has recently been in “start-up” mode.  Over the past three years GPE has developed a new governance structure, new board members, new strategy, new policies on fragile states and data, added a number of new developing country partners, a new results-based financing model, and a new secretariat staffing structure and team, to name a few.  As with any start-up, there are a number of areas where the organization is still struggling and needs to mature.  As the recent conflict in Syria illuminated, the organization has had an identity crisis related to its role in humanitarian contexts, and particularly where pockets of major education needs reside in middle-income rather than low-income countries.  Other examples include its struggle to address donor withdrawal from the education sector (such as the Netherlands). 

Ultimately, the major question still to be answered is whether GPE can marshal truly significant resources and political support, like its multilateral health counterparts do, to help educate those children and youth who need it most.  Next week’s replenishment event will be an important moment in GPE’s development, and it remains to be seen if the international community will double down and invest significantly in GPE.  In our view, this is what is needed to ensure that recent progress is built upon for future and greater impact.  

To get a sense of progress made, we review five areas identified in the midterm review, assess progress made, and highlight outstanding challenges and issues to look out for at next week’s replenishment and beyond 

1. Mobilizing financial resources.The ability of the partnership to build a fund of significant amount to help countries in need as well as encourage higher education financing domestically is at the core of its function.
   
   Problems: The evaluation highlighted shortcomings in FTI’s efforts to mobilize financing for education both domestically and internationally. It found that the financing gap model was ineffective as an aid mobilization tool, and that the endorsement of sector plans did not have the catalytic effect on support for reform efforts as originally intended. Not much improvement is yet evident. Recently, overall education aid allocation has fallen by nearly 10 percent, and education aid to countries in sub-Saharan Africa has fallen by a shocking 21 percent.  Further, GPE has had little teeth when it comes to resisting reduced donor support for education, and managing gaps created by those who have left the sector, like the Netherlands.  Additionally, GPE’s own fund is still small.  Its first replenishment in 2011 included pledges from 60 organizations and a total of only $1.5 billion to the GPE fund over the 2011-2014 period—an amount that is a far cry from addressing the global financing gap that UNESCO estimates exists of $26 billion annually.  
   
   Progress: GPE has taken a number of steps that may help bring in more resources. It introduced a replenishment conference in 2011 to draw more resources into its own fund. Next week will be the second conference. The target for next week’s replenishment is $3.5 billion over three years, definitely up from its target in the first replenishment but under the $4 billion target that the Global Campaign for Education and other civil society groups were recommending.  Linked to this replenishment, the GPE has also introduced a new funding model for how it allocates its funds to partner countries. The model promotes a results-based approach at the sector level. It has requirements on external and domestic financing, data and quality education sector plans, but also incentivizes countries to deliver results in results in learning, equity and efficiency areas.  This combination of funding for needs and towards incentivizing results is likely to attract new donors to the partnership. The new approach builds on progress seen within developing country budgets.  GPE’s Results for Learning Report 2013 showed that domestic spending on education, as a share of GDP, in partner countries increased on average by 10 percent after joining the partnership. However, as the report recognizes, the data is not sufficient to establish attribution to the GPE or tell us why country’s increased their budgets.  
   
   Where to go from here? Funding remains a critically challenging area for GPE and the education sector writ large. The problem is not that there are no funds in donor or government coffers but that the education sector has struggled to substantially attract them.  This year alone, other multilateral mechanisms in health attracted, for equally important and deserving problems, many times the amount GPE is targeting.  For example, in December last year, the Global Fund for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria raised $12 billion from 25 countries, the European Commission, foundations, corporations and faith-based organizations for the 2014-2016 period, a 30 percent increase over the pledges of $9.2 billion secured for 2011-2013. What the replenishment campaign yields next week will be an important indication of progress on this front.  It will also be important to watch if GPE’s new funding model will translate into more diverse funders supporting its work, including the private sector which to date the organization has failed to figure out an effective way to substantially do so. 
   
   

2. Balancing need and performance. GPE needs to be able to reach the neediest children while still encouraging performance and maintaining a focus on results.
   
   

   Problems: The FTI was flawed in terms of its reach, as it struggled to fund the neediest countries due to its focus on rewarding good performers.  Most notably, the midterm evaluation highlighted the importance of finding better ways to help children residing in conflict-affected and fragile states. 
   
   Progress: In 2012, GPE committed to making support for fragile states a strategic priority. Following this decision, a record eight fragile states joined the partnership in 2012 alone. The number of fragile states in the partnership went up from just 1 in 2002 to 17 in 2011 and 28 in 2013, including such countries as Somalia and South Sudan. Today fragile states make up close to half of the total 59 developing country partners in the partnership.  Our analysis suggests that among all bilateral and multilateral donors, GPE is currently one of the most successful in reaching countries in need.  The figure  below illustrates the share of total aid for basic education that is disbursed to 41 countries in need, defined as the 35 low-income countries plus 6 lower middle income countries that have some of the largest out-of-school populations globally. In the case of GPE, 76 percent of total education aid is allocated to low income countries, with a total of 78 percent to the 41 countries in need. In contrast, the respective shares for bilateral donors are 35 percent to low income countries and 47 percent to all 41 countries.
   
   

   Share of Basic Education Aid to Countries in Need (2009-2011 average)

   
   
   
   
   Where to go from here?  While GPE has responded to criticism about insufficient support to fragile states, it is still grappling with the issue of how to address humanitarian crises in non-GPE countries. Because it only funds low-income countries, it has not in any meaningful way helped the thousands of children affected by the Syrian crisis, even though clearly the needs are great.  On the other hand, GPE has committed to accelerated funding in Somalia to help advance education services in the humanitarian response. It will be important to watch how the partnership decides to resolve its engagement in humanitarian contexts and perhaps most importantly they will need to lay out a consistent strategy and financing modalities so that other actors will know what they can and cannot expect from GPE.
   
   
3. Moving towards a true partnership. It is important that GPE acts as a partnership where the interests of developing countries and donors are aligned, as it seeks to further the aid effectiveness agenda laid out in the Paris, Accra and Busan agreements.
   
   Problems: A major problem with GPE was its initial governance structure as a donor organization, lacking input from developing countries. At its inception the partnership included only seven developing countries and only one developing country was a member on the steering committee. The 2010 midterm review blamed this imbalance for the partnership failing to become a true “compact.”
   
   Progress: This concern has been largely addressed with the new constituency-based governance structure that started in 2011.  The board is now made up of constituencies of actors (e.g. donors, multilateral institutions, developing countries, civil society, the private sector) with an equal balance of developing country and donor partners. Every developing country partner that joins the partnership is represented on the board through one of the constituencies.  
   
   Where to go from here? Today, engagement with developing country partners is no longer the problem but, rather, engagement with donor partners is. The developing country constituencies are regularly represented on the board by ministers of education, but the donor representatives rarely engage their ministers or top officials, nor do the foundations and private sector engage their top staff.  Recently, the profile of the organization has been raised with its new board chair, former Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard.  It will be important to watch how the level of representation and engagement in the GPE board evolves in the future and whether it can play a global leadership role in keeping partners of the partnership to their commitments.
   
   
4. Monitoring and evaluating results. In order for GPE’s investments to have an impact, its activities and process must be properly monitored and evaluated to assess what works and what doesn’t.
   
   Problem: The midterm review found that FTI could not establish if its inputs, let alone outputs, were being achieved due a lack of monitoring and evaluation during implementation.
   
   Progress: The secretariat has now established a monitoring and evaluation unit, and is working toward an open database for developing country partners on 57 key indicators. Additionally, to enable improved monitoring of its own financing flows, GPE is taking a much needed step by beginning to report to the OECD-DAC next month. GPE affirms its commitment to data and evaluation in their new funding model and with the call for pledges to join the “data revolution” at the replenishment.
   
   Where to go from here? The partnership’s ability to follow through with monitoring and evaluation efforts remains to be seen. This will include providing sufficient support at the country level to improve monitoring systems. A comprehensive evaluation of the GPE is planned for 2016.
   
   
5. Program Delivery. Further strengthening of the overall capacity of the secretariat and the GPE partners to support the implementation of Education Sector Plans in a timely manner is deeply critical to the success of the partnership in the years ahead. Successful implementation will also depend on the extent to which the partnership has a clear strategic focus and is able to work effectively using its partnership and financing mechanisms. 
   
   Problem: The midterm review found that involvement past the endorsement stage was often minimal. GPE’s mission includes providing technical assistance and helping address capacity gaps, but the level of support varied widely. Programs have at times been slow-moving and delays in implementation due to procedures with the supervising or managing agency have averaged 13-14 months. The secretariat lacked capacity, and its focus was on helping countries with grant application preparation, taking two-thirds of its time on this task. Finally, GPE was widely criticized as inefficient due to the hosting agreement within the World Bank. 
   
   Progress: To build capacity the secretariat has been growing and adding staff, at the request of the new CEO. Additionally, the secretariat has also spent more time in technical assistance, making 126 country visits in the last two years—mostly assisting countries in developing education sector plans.  In 2011 a new GPE fund was also launched, consolidating the previous catalytic and Education Program Development Fund funding structures. The GPE now offers three types of grants. Its central and largest funding mechanism is the Program Implementation Grant focused on program delivery. This year, a new hosting agreement with the World Bank was also reached in which the secretariat will receive more flexibility to respond to the changing operational and financial landscape in education. 
   
   Where to go from here? GPE’s new funding formula expands its scope to a larger and more varied number of countries, all of which will need to be managed carefully in order for the partnership to be effective.  Further strengthening of the capacity of the secretariat will be needed to manage this extended scope. The partnerships management and financial instruments will also need to evolve and evaluated to ensure they match the GPE’s expanded ambition.

Our assessment shows that while imperfections remain and further progress needs to be made in a number of areas, the GPE is now performing much better and can productively absorb an increase in its funding. Funders cannot use the excuse that they have no confidence that their funds will be well-used or well-monitored.  The recent declines in donor funding for basic education are denying many poor families the chance to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty through education. These reductions should be immediately reversed. The GPE has an important role in making this happen.

The 45 non-oil Least Developed Countries (LDCs), mostly African countries, are continuing to lose market share in world exports. For them, and for many developing countries, the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements they signed up to as part of the Single Undertaking of the Uruguay round were rules derived from international conventions developed by industrialized countries that were well beyond their needs in their current stage of institutional development. They were dubious that this ‘rules-based’ globalization would be the engine for growth and poverty-reduction that it had been for East Asian economies, most recently China.  

The 2005 Aid for Trade initiative (AFT) was created to provide financial and technical support to help developing countries, particularly LDCs, to build the needed supply-side capacity to ”implement and benefit from WTO agreements” with the aim of regaining market share and meeting the Millennium Development Goals. The scaling up of aid was to adhere to the so-called Paris Principles (ownership, alignment of aid with national priorities, coordination among donors and a focus on results and mutual accountability).

A just-released e-book by the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR) and the Fondation pour les études et recherches sur le développement International (FERDI) critically reviews the evaluations of aid-for-trade activities carried out by donors and by the OECD-WTO biennial task forces. The study concludes that while the initiative helped arrest the decline in aid by mobilizing resources, the focus of the biennial reviews was more on discussing results rather than showing them. The achievements of the AFT initiative are now at risk as development budgets come under increasing pressure. 

The e-book argues that the recently signed Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) in Bali in December 2013 which recognizes the need of Aid for Trade for developing countries and calls for assistance in capacity building, particularly for LDCs, provides the needed impetus to supply evidence about AFT’s effectiveness. That is, to narrow down the focus of AFT activities and to identify the measures that will contribute most to reducing red tape and increase predictability in customs clearance (fees, formalities, transit).  An increasingly large toolkit of impact evaluation methods-- many drawing on existing data—reviewed in the book provide the means for doing so. These methods will also help answer questions that will arise when implementing the TFA. For example, we do know that, after controlling for a host of other factors that determine trade, all components of trade costs, however measured, reduce the volume of trade and that is it is the non-tariff components of trade costs at the heart of the TFA that matter most.  We also know that 85 percent of AFT funds go to finance hard infrastructure projects. However, we still do not know whether funds should go to build more roads, to rehabilitate them, or to improve competition in service provision. Neither do we know whether scarce funds should go towards reducing transport costs or towards customs reform. In addition, it is also unclear whether funds for customs reform should go towards providing incentives for greater integrity or for computerizing processes.

Following an overview placing AFT in the context of the TFA, Olivier Cadot and I show that trade merits receiving aid. This review-based conclusion  comes at a point when the longstanding controversy on trade as an engine of growth is coming to a close, with all recent work pointing to causation running from trade to growth (and thus to job creation and poverty reduction). However, debate surrounds the relative importance of ‘hard’ vs. ‘soft’ infrastructure, not least because causal links are tenuous, as trade-cost proxies are ad-hoc averages of indicators which, more often than not, measure intermediate outcomes rather than project or policy levers. Drawing on recent studies, Cadot and I then discuss the possibilities for improved evaluation from the growing toolkit of impact-evaluation techniques.

In a following chapter, Richard Newfarmer distils the lessons from the large collection of case studies and project narratives either supplied to donors or to the OECD-WTO reviews.  In spite of a growing number of mentions of ‘trade’ in budget speeches, case-study visitors often found that people in-country had no knowledge of AFT and that its wide definition made it difficult for evaluators to draw boundaries around their projects. Among the case studies, only Colombia and Rwanda relied on systematic monitoring and evaluation systems.

A final chapter by Paul Brenton and Ian Gillson evaluates the Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF) where the push for integrating the LDCs into the WTO-based world trading system started. They review lessons from a decade of Diagnostic Trade Integration Studies (DTISs) and suggest ways to strengthen the process. First, with the sharp reduction of the visible policy barriers that distort incentives, modern trade policy now spans a wide range of issues under the purview of many ministries. The Trade Ministry that houses AFT activities lacks the clout to set up any effective coordination mechanism. Second, the trade-off between the objective of shared ownership, which may imply treading lightly on sensitive issues, and that of laying bare all issues, obscures the political economy issues that would help understand stumbling blocks to implementation.  Last but not least, they note that DTISs have been carried out at the national level while many issues (e.g. food shortages during the crisis) call for regional cooperation.

The e-book concludes with suggestions to help establish the effectiveness of the AFT initiative. First, donors and governments should concentrate on the TFA, which requires measures to increase the transparency of trade that are sufficiently well-defined to be subjected to evaluation For example, does prior publication and consultation or advance rulings make a greater difference? What impact can one expect from implementation of the revised principles of the Kyoto convention (1974) for simplified formalities for transit?

Second, in Sub-Saharan Africa where the returns on successful regional integration are the highest because of  across countries along many dimensions (resource-rich and resource-poor, landlocked and coastal, large and small), future DTISs should be coordinated at the regional level to help realize the gains from deeper integration to internalize regional spillovers.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, since resources are concentrated in low-income countries with limited institutional capabilities, permanent, but implementable monitoring and evaluation procedures should be put in place without creating additional structures, as has already been done among some recipients. Only with an improved implementation record will private sector participation---needed for ownership—take place.

For additional information, download the e-book here.

Editor's Note: In this blog, George Ingram discusses the key elements of the New Deal. For a more detailed assessment of its implementation, read this latest paper, Implementing the New Deal for Fragile States.

The g7+ is an association of 20 countries afflicted by conflict and fragility that have joined together to share experiences and lessons and advocate for reform. The New Deal, endorsed at the 2011 meeting on aid effectiveness in Busan, is an accord between the g7+ and donor countries that creates a framework for how those countries can move from fragility to sustainable development. Among key elements of the New Deal are: an assessment of the underlying dynamics of a country’s fragility, a single agreed-upon plan on how to move away from fragility, and a focus on specific elements that contribute to sustainability. While the New Deal compact is an agreement between a g7+ country and donors, the emphasis is on country leadership and ownership with donors playing a supporting role.

The components of the New Deal are:

“Implementing the New Deal for Fragile States,” a paper I have recently coauthored with Jacob Hughes, Ted Hooley, and Siafa Hage, is an assessment of the New Deal compact and its results.  The paper is based on extensive interviews with lead staff of the seven g7+ pilot countries, donors, and civil society. The overall conclusion is that the New Deal does provide a framework for countries to move beyond fragility, but it has yet to bring the relevant behavior change by either g7+ governments or donors.

A major shortfall in the implementation of the New Deal is that it has proceeded along a technical rather than a political dimension. The New Deal recognizes that conflict and fragility are fundamentally political, but most of the action has been in complying with some of the components by technical experts rather than engagement at the political level. This is true for both the g7+ countries and donors.  Countries have not convened and shepherded through the necessary national political dialogue to bring together disparate communities, and civil society, which could facilitate reconciliation, has not been sufficiently involved in New Deal processes. Similarly, donors have relegated the New Deal to the technical and managerial level and senior political leaders seldom attend meetings of the New Deal.  

A parallel assessment by the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding & Statebuilding (INDPS) reports findings on the New Deal consistent with findings of our report.

Enthusiasm for the New Deal remains strong, but frustration is growing by all parties on the slow implementation and lack of change by all parties. It is critically important that g7+ leaders extend their political leadership of the New Deal and engagement across their entire government, that civil society be accorded its rightful role and be provide with the support it needs to play a constructive role, and that donors become engaged at the senior leadership level and begin to take more risk in engagement with g7+ countries.

The New Deal empowers political and civic leaders in fragile countries to take charge of their country’s future and focused international attention on how countries can move from fragility to sustainable development, including in the discussions of the post-2015 global goals.  It would be a tragedy if this historic initiative failed due to lack of commitment and adequate engagement by g7+ donors, governments, and civil society. It is hoped that this independent assessment, along with that of the International Dialogue, will galvanize renewed commitment and action that will fulfill the promise of the New Deal.

It has been nearly three years since the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States (“the New Deal”) was endorsed at the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan in 2011. Given the minimal progress of fragile states in achieving the Millennium Development Goals1 (MDGs) and that conflict and fragility are part of the deliberations on the post-2015 global development agenda, it is appropriate to assess New Deal implementation to date and see what early lessons can be learned. This review is intended to provide insights on current efforts and provoke thought and discussion on how implementation could be improved.

Since the New Deal was endorsed in Busan, a group of fragile states known as the g7+ has emerged to champion support for fragile states. The group started in 2010 with seven members but by May, 2014, its membership spanned 20 countries from four continents. The g7+ represents the first time a genuine constituency of fragile states has begun to engage with one other and with the international community about the causes of fragility and how to address it. Despite the modest progress that has been made and the enthusiasm of New Deal focal points among donors, civil society, and g7+ pilot countries, implementation of the New Deal to date is characterized by unmet conditions, unrealistic expectations about timeframes, and a lack of sustained dialogue about the causes of conflict and fragility. Overall, the Peacebuilding and Statebuilding Goals (PSGs) are being adopted into national development plans (Figure 1), but donors and civil society have concerns about the g7+ pilot countries’ commitment to use these goals as the basis for an inclusive and sustained dialogue about the causes of conflict and fragility. Conversely, although some elements of the TRUST component (Figure 1) are being implemented, g7+ pilot country governments have concerns about donors’ commitments to share risk and increase the use of country systems. Progress has been made in the implementation of the FOCUS elements (Figure 1), in terms of the number of fragility assessments conducted and compacts or mutual accountability frameworks established, but concern exists at the global level that there has been an overemphasis on the technical exercises and insufficient effort put toward political dialogue at the country level. The effort put into technical processes should not overshadow sustained political dialogue, and the tendency to rely on conditionality as the basis for New Deal partnership should be consciously avoided.

Greater investment should be made in rolling out the New Deal to reduce the amount of confusion surrounding it at the country level. This would perhaps best be accomplished by building the capacity within the different stakeholder groups, and especially by bolstering dedicated staffing for the New Deal. Donors and the g7+ should increase their domestic advocacy and educate stakeholders about the expectations inherent to New Deal participation, the potential risk-benefit tradeoffs, and the underlying assumptions about their willingness to do things differently. A combination of fewer conditions, increased investment, more inclusive political dialogue, and better domestic advocacy could render the New Deal a transformative approach to addressing the challenges and opportunities that exist in fragile and conflict-affected states.

This paper is an independent assessment of New Deal implementation. It is based on a review of New Deal documentation and interviews with focal points in g7+ pilot countries, lead donor agencies, and civil society. The interviews were conducted during April, May, and June 2014. This review focuses on the original seven pilot countries that volunteered to implement the New Deal: Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Liberia, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Timor Leste. The review also includes Somalia, given that a compact was developed there in 2013.

Editor's Note: This blog is a guest contribution from Gabriel Sanchez-Zinny and James McBride, who participated in a Brookings roundtable discussion on the post-2015 education agenda  on July 29, 2014. 

On July 29, 2014, a group of education and development experts gathered at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, to discuss the prospects for—and challenges to—education reform in the post-2015 development agenda.

“Post-2015” refers to the stage following the end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of targets adopted in 2000. As the MDGs expire, there is a debate taking place around how best to proceed, and what will take their place.

The Brookings discussion jumped head-first into this debate, at the center of which is a recent UNESCO position paper proposing the adoption of new global education goals. The proposal consists of 10 targets for education, including the investment of 20 percent of state budgets for education, achieving universal literacy, and increasing the numbers of adults enrolling in continuing education or technical training. UNESCO also suggests 25 indicators that can serve as signposts on the way to achieving these goals.

On hand to discuss and critique the UNESCO proposal, as well as to lead a discussion of possible alternative approaches, was Ariel Fiszbein, a former chief economist for the World Bank and director of the education program at the Inter-American Dialogue. Fiszbein’s remarks highlighted the need to focus first and foremost on quality of education. He argued that the idea of ensuring adequate quality is largely absent from the UNESCO proposal outside primary education, in favor of an emphasis on expanding coverage. To him, getting more children into schools will do little intrinsic good if they are not learning while they are there—and indeed, Fiszbein pointed out that poor quality schools were actually a major driver of poor coverage, since students drop out at greater rates when classes are not delivering any value to their lives.

Another aspect of the discussion centered on how education policy goals fit into the political dialogues of nations undergoing reforms. Countries often resist setting specific targets, as the UNESCO proposal does, because such targets impact the domestic political balance of power between agencies and branches of government.

This is where the issue of coverage versus quality came into play. Clearly, education reform will always be a political process, one embedded in the ongoing negotiations and positioning of the governing coalition. Yet the group agreed that reformers must recognize when the political nature of the process benefits some types of approaches over others. For instance, governments are inclined towards expanding coverage because it supports key constituencies, while reforms to improve quality—such as stricter evaluations and higher standards—challenge the status quo.

As far as the specific targets are concerned, Fiszbein believes that these are “moral benchmarks” that should guide actions for schools, governments, and society as a whole. Education goals should be broad guidelines that focus on ensuring discipline and accountability. But they should also be concise, clear, and intelligible by civil society at large—an area in which Fiszbein feels the UNESCO protocols, with their complexity, fall short.

Given that the UNESCO proposals would not be binding and would influence primarily by inspiring policymakers to action, Fiszbein also proposed more concrete means of measuring the effectiveness of education benchmarks. He suggested conducting nationwide assessments beginning early, with the first or second year of primary school, in order to have a baseline for comparison as students enter the later stages of their education. He argued that references to national standards alone are not helpful. How are citizens to know if the proposed standards are adequate without the benefit of some international benchmarks?  If carried out regularly and comprehensively, assessments can provide clear comparisons—and encourage positive competition—between countries, put a valuable accountability tool in the hands of the citizenry and incite governments to action.

The discussion also covered how specific recommendations should be in prescribing the reform process. To some around the table, the UNESCO targets seemed over-determined, not only establishing what the outcomes should be but also exactly how they should be reached—for instance, in requiring that governments spend at least 20 percent of their national budget on education.

Many argue that such specificity on “inputs” is warranted, because governments need to be pushed to commit a certain amount to education. But others argued that the role of the international community should be to determine outcomes only, and let individual countries take whatever route works to achieving those outcomes. In that way, innovation and flexibility can be preserved without sacrificing accountability.  Moreover, we know that there is not always a strong link between outputs and inputs: in the absence of effective and accountable school systems, spending 20 percent of the budget on education may be a colossal waste.

Despite its controversies and flaws, the group agreed that UNESCO has made an important contribution in the Post-2015 discussion. Already 70 countries have supported the goals, giving reformers hope that the international community will be able to avoid a lowest-common-denominator approach to standard-setting in education.

The development community has learned that reforms have to be owned to be sustained. Post-2015, change will take hold and learning will improve only if a quality-oriented education reform movement emerges from within national political processes as something to be embraced, not feared.

There are fewer than 500 days before the world reaches its deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. These goals contain a set of targets agreed to by world leaders in 2000 to eradicate poverty and hunger, ensure universal primary education and women’s rights and improve health across the globe by 2015.  With the finish line in sight, it is time to focus our attention on completing the job. We will need every single one of the 500 days we have left.

The goal of achieving universal primary education is very close to my heart. Nearly 60 million children are still out of school around the world, and most of them are incredibly disadvantaged. Half live in conflict-affected areas, millions more are poor girls living in rural areas. Until that last child, that final girl or boy who currently does not have an opportunity to get a great education, finds her or himself in school and learning, our job is not complete.

Only 17 out of the 74 countries analyzed in a major report by UNESCO are expected to reach universal primary school enrollment by 2015. By 2030 that number will rise to 26. If we, as an international community, continue at the rate we are going, 24 countries will still not have achieved universal primary enrollment in 2060. In Niger, business as usual will mean universal primary enrollment is not realized until 2120.

In these final 500 days, we should turn our attention to tackling two major issues that would help millions of children into primary education: child marriage and education in conflict situations. According to the Education Countdown campaign, 14 million girls under the age of 18 become brides each year, a major barrier to those same girls attending school. In Niger, 75 percent of girls are married before the age of 18. It is therefore no surprise that just 12 percent of girls are enrolled in lower-secondary school and only 57 percent of girls are enrolled in primary school. This is simply unacceptable.

On education in conflict situations, we know that the use of schools as military bases or headquarters during armed conflict has a lasting impact on the educational opportunities for children both during conflict and beyond. School buildings are destroyed, psychosocial damage is inflicted on the communities, with these situations overwhelmingly impacting the most disadvantaged families. This can be seen clearly in the recent conflict in Gaza where more than 138 schools were damaged or destroyed.

It is not all grim news, however. There is much to be proud of. In the past couple of decades, great strides have been made towards achieving universal primary enrollment. In developing regions, 90 percent of children are now enrolled in primary school. Between 1990 and 2012 in Northern Africa primary school enrollment rates increased from 80 percent to 99 percent, and in South Asia from 75 percent to 94 percent, meaning millions of children now have access to an education who otherwise would not have.

To build on this great work, in these final 500 days the international community should turn its attention to addressing some of the biggest barriers to universal access, namely:

• Ending Child Marriage. The Education Countdown campaign is calling for a “child-marriage free zone” in Pakistan, to change legal marriage ages to above 18 in eight countries and end policies that prevent pregnant young women from attending school. These measures would help bring millions of marginalized girls into formal school systems.
• Targeting Funding to Education in Conflict. As I laid out last week in honor of World Humanitarian Day, we need increased funding and more flexibility in the delivery of education to those in conflict contexts. The Global Partnership for Education is working toward that end, promoting increased funding through pooled mechanisms that will reach children in need quickly.
• Making Schools Safe Zones. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack has introduced draft “Lucens Guidelines” to declare schools as safe zones and help improve education prospects for nearly 30 million out-of-school children living in conflict-affected areas. If all countries signed on and enacted the guidelines in the next 500 days we could reach many of those children.

In these remaining 500 days, we should take inspiration from Malala Yousafzai, who recently said, “we should believe in the power of our voice and we should believe that yes, it can really bring a change.”  Malala is right. We should not give up on attaining the Millennium Development Goals. Let’s march towards the finish line together and make a concerted effort to achieve these goals. While the conversations around the “post-2015” agenda are important (and indeed, I will have much more to say on this topic) we should not let our current targets slip. Sixty million children are depending on us. We cannot let them down. 

Event Information

As the United Nations conceives Sustainable Development Goals to tackle global problems through 2030, food security and ending hunger are foremost concerns. Currently, more than half of the world’s people rely on rice for most of their calories and nutrients, with demand particularly high in Asia and parts of Africa. Yet it is precisely these areas where dwindling land and the prospect of climate change have kept rice production from keeping pace.

At the forefront of tackling this challenge is the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which since the 1960s has helped lead scientific research in developing rice varieties that are more resilient and nutritious. IRRI has also developed technologies to assist in rice production, built an understanding of optimal rice farming practices, and helped to distribute this knowledge to where it is most needed across the world.

On September 25, Brookings hosted a conversation on global food security, the prospects for ending global hunger, and the role that rice production and IRRI may be able to play today and in the future. Dr. Robert Zeigler, director general of IRRI, gave a brief presentation, after which Brookings Visiting Fellow John McArthur moderated a discussion.

Audio

• Tackling the “Zero Hunger Challenge” by 2030: A Conversation with Robert Zeigler

Earlier this week, the World Bank published its latest estimate of global poverty, reporting that 1.01 billion people lived under $1.25 a day in 2011. Such estimates typically receive a good deal of attention and this time is likely to be no different. A goal to end extreme poverty is expected to feature as the cornerstone of a successor agenda to the Millennium Development Goals. In theory, the new poverty numbers should give a clear indication of how far we stand away from that mark, which is crucial to assessing the goal’s feasibility. Yet, in our view, the new poverty estimate fails to do this.

We are pleased to see global poverty numbers receiving greater attention. Ending extreme poverty is not the endgame of development, nor does the simple indicator of income poverty capture all aspects of well-being, but it remains a communicable and critical measure of human progress.

We also commend the World Bank for adopting its own institutional target to reduce the global poverty rate to 3 percent by 2030, and for thinking seriously about how poverty data can be improved. The World Bank, more than any other institution, understands the conceptual and empirical issues involved in monitoring poverty, as demonstrated in yesterday’s release of an impressive policy research report.

One change already in place is the bank’s commitment to report on progress against global poverty on an annual basis, where previously such updates only occurred around every 3 years. This commitment was made by President Jim Kim at his Georgetown speech in April 2013 when the bank’s “twin goals” were first unveiled. Updating global estimates every year means that new information can more rapidly inform and improve our understanding.

A good example of this is provided by India. Until Wednesday, the most recent global poverty estimates drew from India’s 2009-10 National Sample Survey, which was conducted at the height of a drought. That survey gave the impression that poverty reduction had been sluggish over the preceding 5 years, despite this being a period of record economic growth in the country. This week’s new estimates use data from India’s 2011-12 National Sample Survey, conducted when conditions were more representative. It reports about 100 million less people living under $1.25. One result is that the oft-repeated claim that the number of extreme poor living in India exceeds that in Africa can finally be put to rest. (As a counterexample, we are baffled by the bank’s decision to continue to use Nigeria’s 2010 Harmonized Living Standards Survey whose data are riddled with inconsistencies, when more recent estimates from the 2011 and 2013 General Household Survey Panel are available. Whereas the 2010 survey reports a poverty rate of over 60 percent, the more recent surveys suggest the rate is closer to 30 percent.)

At the same time, it is hard to come away from the new global estimates without feeling underwhelmed and frustrated by their limitations.

First, it is disappointing to see that the World Bank continues to generate poverty estimates based on 2005 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) data rather than the new 2011 PPP data published earlier this year. As we pointed out in May, the new PPPs suggest that prices in developing countries are far lower than previously thought, which has a dramatic bearing on poverty numbers.

The bank has put off incorporating the new price data into its poverty calculations until it has had time to explore the changes and their causes more carefully. Such research is undoubtedly of value. Yet everything we know about the design and implementation of the 2011 International Comparison Program (the source of the new PPP data) suggests it is superior to the previous round. Choosing to delay the adoption of the new PPPs means consciously opting to employ inferior data. It also effectively puts in limbo the bank’s institutional poverty goal (including its interim 2020 target to reduce the global poverty rate to 9 percent) and more importantly, the forging of the post-2015 development agenda, which is actively being negotiated.

There is a second respect in which the World Bank’s new estimates have the feeling of immediately being old: we are furnished with global poverty estimates for 2011 as we near the end of 2014.

There is no reason why the bank could not generate provisional poverty estimates for the current year that can later be revised as and when additional data comes in. This is the approach taken with almost every other time-series of important economic data. World Bank country economists are well positioned to generate such estimates and in fact have done so in some bank regions for some time. Alongside its release of 2011 global poverty estimates, the bank has published projections of poverty for 2015 and other outer years. It is absurd that the bank is willing to provide estimates of poverty in the past and poverty in the future, while refusing to estimate poverty today. 

One of the innovations introduced by President Kim is the creation of a “Delivery Unit” specifically charged with generating real-time data on key performance indicators. Shouldn’t poverty data be held to the same standard?

Finally, it is disappointing that the World Bank chose to wait so long before updating PovcalNet: the online repository of survey data which serves as the source of global poverty estimates. This update includes the addition of data from several dozen national household surveys that the bank has obtained since the last revision 18 months ago.

In recent years, PovcalNet has become an indispensable resource for poverty researchers around the world; indeed it has played its part in a mini-revolution within development research, in which more open data and social media have reduced barriers and increased accountability. The delay in updating the public version of PovcalNet, while bank staff had access to an updated internal version, certainly goes against the bank’s claim to be a leader in the open data movement.

The World Bank is charged with promoting evidence for policymaking, not data for economic historians. Yet its institutional culture seems to steer it more towards the latter than the former. As the steward of global poverty data, this has to change.

Last week U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued his long-awaited report, “The Road to Dignity by 2030.” The report frames the beginning of the end-game for negotiations in 2015 on what will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It suggests six “essential elements” as a way of simplifying and communicating the 17 goals and many dozen targets recommended by the intergovernmental Open Working Group (OWG).

While many observers hoped the text would somehow prioritize and slim down the comprehensive package crafted as a political compromise by the OWG, Mr. Ban welcomed the outcome and took “positive note” of the General Assembly decision to make it the basis of negotiation. In addition to giving prominence to themes such as justice, dignity and prosperity, he also presents a strong message on the need for a new and ambitious financing strategy that takes note of the business sector’s potential for a more developed monitoring and accountability structure compared to the MDGs. Many countries appreciated the secretary-general’s approach in their first official responses. The months ahead will see how they carry forward the various elements, goals, and targets.

Amidst the policy complexities, it is worth stepping back to consider the nature of the most fundamental high-level political agreements essential to advancing the agenda.  As a reference point, the Millennium Development Goals were set in 2000, but only came to life after the March 2002 Monterrey Consensus forged two overarching global deals. One was the agreement that markets are the driver of long-term economic growth, and public sectors have a responsibility to support them. This resolved a decades-long battle over the role of state versus markets. The other was an agreement that developing country governments have primary responsibility for their own destiny, but the poorest countries need active support from the richest countries in order to meet major development goals.

Similarly, over the coming year, the sustainable development agenda can be boiled down to the need for countries to converge around three breakthrough global political agreements. 

The first breakthrough agreement is to provide every human being with the minimum basic services required to permit them to participate in and benefit from globalization. These minimum standards—which have been described elsewhere as “leaving no one behind” and “global social floor”—would provide dignity for all, end extreme income poverty and hunger, provide minimum levels of schooling and healthcare, and ensure access to basic infrastructure services like energy, water, road transport and bank accounts. They would eliminate the most pernicious forms of exclusion. They imply a new global social contract based on meeting people’s needs and aspirations, not those of countries.

The second breakthrough agreement is a new global approach to infrastructure—one that ramps up the investments required to boost prosperity, ensure resilience, and reduce global carbon emissions.  In dollar terms, infrastructure investments—to build planet-friendly energy networks, transport systems, information highways, and urban habitats—require the most financing in the global sustainable development agenda, estimated at roughly $3 trillion a year in developing countries alone. Most, but not all, of these investments will be funded from domestic savings. Foreign savings will also need to be mobilized, but the current international development finance system falls orders-of-magnitude short in intermediating foreign savings and long-term investments in developing countries. Consider that the World Bank Group’s financing for infrastructure was just $24 billion in 2014, a drop in the bucket of what is required. Moreover, the majority of the world now lives in cities, so a huge share of infrastructure investments need to take place at the municipal level. But there is no systematic approach to helping developing countries’ sub-sovereign entities access finance.

Infrastructure is usually considered to be more a technocratic subject than a topic for global political bargains. But without new agreements at the highest political level, many countries will be unable to meet their sustainable development needs. Most pressingly, in most of the world, low-cost energy is high-carbon energy, and low-carbon remains high-cost. This must change. What can be done? Advanced countries need to develop and support the expansion of new low-carbon technologies, especially for electricity generation, transmission and distribution. They can also help prepare specific projects, as the G-20 Global Infrastructure Hub proposes to do. They can encourage the multilateral institutions they control to lend more for low-carbon infrastructure and provide more guarantees to leverage private capital. Meanwhile developing countries can take on more responsibility for funding infrastructure themselves, which is why the new BRICS bank and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank have been created. They can also ensure that infrastructure projects are efficiently planned, get properly used and maintained, avoid corruption, and use high environmental and social standards.

The third breakthrough agreement is about enhanced accountability among governments and industry.  There will be no legal international enforcement of the sustainable development goals so—to a vastly greater extent than under the MDGs—countries will need to apply their own specific targets to commonly identified global challenges. The secretary-general has rightly recommended regional peer reviews as one way of holding country governments accountable, but real teeth will only come from a compact between governments and their own citizens.

Businesses, too, need to be held more accountable if the sustainable development goals are to be met. This does not have to be done in a contentious way. Major companies like Unilever and DuPont have pioneered new approaches to long-term, multi-dimensional corporate reporting that already makes management and other stakeholders aware of the social and environmental footprint of their activities.  More than 1300 companies have signed on to the Principles for Responsible Investment. From Hong Kong to Johannesburg, many stock exchanges around the world are requiring sustainability reporting from their listed companies, while U.S. regulators are asking companies to report on their sourcing of conflict minerals. Multiple pension funds, especially in Europe, have leveraged their public mandates to apply long-run environmental and social accounting standards.

It is time for a more assertive approach to business accountability. Mr. Ban asks countries to require mandatory sustainability reporting for companies, along with regulatory changes to make sure that profit-maximizing competitive behavior promotes sustainable business activities. In the simplest terms, Coca-Cola will be more willing to implement new reporting standards if PepsiCo and India’s Tata Tea do too.

There will be lots of heated debate over the shape of the post-2015 agenda in coming months. But stepping back from the details, if the process results in an agreement to establish minimum services for humanity, develop new global mechanisms for financing infrastructure, and define new accountability standards for governments and businesses, it would be a dramatic change from business-as-usual. Mr. Ban’s report challenges countries to forge fast consensus on these breakthrough areas for agreement.

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In 2015, the international community is slated to establish two landmark agreements to help guide many dimensions of global cooperation for a generation. The first will be set in September at United Nations headquarters, where world leaders will confirm a set of “sustainable development goals” to succeed the Millennium Development Goals that have galvanized global anti-poverty efforts since 2000. The new goals aim to establish quantitative targets for ending poverty, achieving shared prosperity, and protecting the planet by 2030. The second agreement will take shape in Paris in December, the international deadline for a new long-term global climate accord.

On January 13, Brookings will host Amina J. Mohammed, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s special adviser on post-2015 development planning, to discuss the secretary-general’s recent major report, “The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives, and Protecting the Planet.” Ms. Mohammed will present key recommendations from the report, which forms a synthesis of the broadest and most inclusive global consultation the U.N. has ever undertaken, and she will also discuss priorities for the global sustainable development negotiations over the year ahead.

Following a short presentation, Ms. Mohammed will join a panel discussion. The panelists will then take questions from the audience.

Editor Note: On January 9, Homi Kharas spoke on development in the post-2015 agenda at the Kapuscinski Development Lecture in Riga, Latvia. Watch video from the speech here.  

It is a great pleasure and honor for me to be here today. I am especially delighted to give a talk that honors Ryszard Kapuscinski. Kapuscinski was a product of a time when the world was divided into blocs: the First World of advanced capitalist countries; the Second World of communist, state-led societies; the Third World of underdeveloped states and impoverished people. His great success was due to his ability to bring to life the strange goings-on in the Third World for an audience that otherwise had no insight into the everyday life of ordinary citizens in other continents. He was curious about the world and about people, no matter where they lived or how exalted or ordinary they were. So I imagine that Kapuscinski would approve of the basic thrust of my talk today which is that we are entering a new phase of development, a phase where sustainable development is not just something for Third World countries or the developing world to attempt, but something that is deeply and fundamentally relevant for all societies, everywhere, including those in the First and Second Worlds. He’d be curious about this transition from “the developing world” to “a developing world”.

Of course I am not going to argue that all countries are the same or that they face the same priorities for change. But there is a sense that people everywhere have similar aspirations. They want the opportunity to build a better life for themselves and their families, to be assured of personal safety and justice, to be treated with dignity and respect, to connect with others and share experiences openly, and to do all of this in a way that our children’s, children’s children will thank us for.

In the past two years, there has been an unprecedented conversation about what to do after this year, 2015, when the Millennium Development Goals are set to expire. This conversation, led by the United Nations in the context of the post-2015 agenda, has engaged governments, civil society, business leaders, academics, scientists, and people from all walks of life about a vision for sustainable development. Among the many varied viewpoints offered there was one point on which there was general agreement. No one thinks any country anywhere, regardless of whether they are in the First, Second or Third Worlds, has found a path towards sustainable development, a path that satisfies the expectations of the current generation, without compromising the opportunities available for future generations—and a path that is broad enough for the 9 billion people who will be alive in 2050. We all believe that we must do something new, that “business-as-usual” will not suffice, that we must alter the social, environmental and economic trends that are shaping our societies.

Most of us also believe that if countries attempt to find a path to sustainable development together, pursuing the same broad vision jointly, sharing experiences, knowledge and sometimes financial resources, that the chances of success for each country will be higher. In other words, many of us believe that a multilateral, cooperative approach will produce better results than a go-it-alone approach. Partly, this is because of the fear that “global bads” like climate change, Ebola or the spread of other infectious diseases, or terrorism and crime might cross borders if left unchecked in any place in the world. But partly this is also because of the belief that “global goods” like ending poverty and hunger, free trade, knowledge exchange, technology innovations, and the expansion of markets can have important spillover benefits everywhere.

What the world needs now is a road-map, an action plan to make this broad vision operational and to change the functioning of the global economy. Three fundamental shifts are called for.

What the world needs now is a road-map, an action plan to make this broad vision operational and to change the functioning of the global economy. Three fundamental shifts are called for.

First, a shift towards providing everyone on the planet with services—health, education, nutrition, personal safety--that reach at least a basic minimum standard to give them a chance to participate in the global economy. The idea that we should leave no one behind means focusing more on the poorest and most vulnerable nations and on the poorest and most marginalized citizens within every nation.

Second, a shift towards a new growth pattern that sharply reduces carbon emissions and that builds resilient societies. Such a growth pattern should also provide jobs and enough opportunities to avoid increasing inequalities. It will be determined by the efficiency of new infrastructure that will be put in place over the next decade—the buildings, urban transport, electricity generation, transmission and distribution systems, and agricultural, forestry and land management practices—and by ensuring that access to this infrastructure is more equal, connecting every individual and small business to national and global markets.

Third, a shift towards a better governed globalization, with rules for trade and investment that level the playing field for all firms, and incentives that prevent overexploitation of our planetary resources. Global rules must balance between giving incentives for creating new products, like new vaccines and medicines or flood- and drought-resistant rice varieties, and giving incentives for cheaper access to and more rapid diffusion of these among and within countries. They must balance the need for stability in global systems, like finance, and the desirability of constant innovation to encourage finance to take risks and to flow to areas where returns are highest.

Every country has a role to play in each of these three shifts, and this is why the post-2015 agenda is truly universal. It starts with every country putting its own house in order. There are still too many policies that work against sustainable development, like fossil fuel subsidies, tax loopholes, corporate secrecy that conceals illicit financial flows, and legal discrimination against women. It continues with making smart public investment decisions, at home and abroad. It is extraordinary that public investments are declining at a time when economists are generating estimates of benefits returned to various public investments in sustainable development of $20 to $100 for each dollar spent and when the cost of borrowing long-term money is only 2-3 percent per year for many rich country governments. And finally it means doing more research and encouraging more business innovation.

Looked at in this way, it is clear that a universal agenda for sustainable development is also a “beyond-aid” agenda. Civil society and mass movements in each country should be posing three questions about sustainable development. Are the policies of my country working in a coherent way toward sustainable development, both at home and abroad? Is my government trying to make sure that opportunities for high return public investments are being realized, at home and abroad? Are we creating enough new research and innovations to get us on the social and environmental trajectories that are necessary, at home and abroad?

The hope and expectation is that answers to these three questions will be sketched out in 2015. 2015 is an exciting year. It is a pivotal moment when global political agreement can be reached on the contours of sustainable development.

2015 has been designated as the first-ever European Year for Development, an opportunity for the largest providers of development cooperation in the world, the European Union member states, to assure their citizens that their policies, money and innovation efforts are contributing to a better world.

In May 2015, the World Education Forum will take place in Incheon, Korea. This is an important forum because the answer commonly given to some of the most pressing social sustainability problems of today—youth unemployment, social immobility, stagnant wages—is to improve education and skills for the 21^st century. The forum should help outline what can be done to deliver quality education.

Then, in July 2015, the United Nation’s third international conference on financing for development will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. At this conference, commitments should be made to help the least developed and most vulnerable countries, to create new channels for development finance that can handle the large volumes of investments that will be required to place economies on a low-carbon trajectory, and to ensure that businesses too are responsible and accountable for activities that contribute toward sustainable development. It is an important opportunity to get finance ministers to focus on sustainable development and for foreign ministers to establish priorities that can be met within current budget constraints.

In September 2015, Heads of State and Government will gather in New York at the General Assembly to agree on a set of sustainable development goals for the next fifteen years. Intergovernmental negotiations are underway, but the broad outlines of the agreement have been laid out. It will be comprehensive in scope across sectors and themes, going beyond the Millennium Development Goals to incorporate infrastructure, jobs and growth, and peace, justice and inclusive societies. And it will be universal in application, going beyond aid to cover policies ranging from sustainable production and consumption patterns to the sharing of tax information.

Finally, in December 2015, there is great anticipation that a historic agreement on combating climate change and its impacts will be concluded at the COP21 ministerial meeting in Paris.

Any one of these events could be momentous. Together, they offer the best opportunity for our generation to create a road map for “a developing world”.

Looking forward, the post-2015 agenda must take into account the extraordinary changes that have happened over the last fifteen years. The world cannot be subdivided any more into First World countries that provide aid and Third World countries that receive it. We cannot conceive of development any longer as something that is done “by” rich and systemically important countries “for” less advanced and smaller countries. In fact, when countries are able to take charge of their own development, when they are in the driver’s seat, they look for opportunities for trade, investment and technology transfer as much as for aid.

The biggest change in the world today is that so many more countries have taken control over and responsibility for their own development. Domestic taxes, not aid, are the most rapidly growing source of development finance everywhere except for a handful of countries. Today, there are only 33 low income countries in the world, half the number in 2000. Countries have become richer and are growing much faster than was the case in 2000. Almost all are growing—only nine have declining GDP per capita, compared to 36 in the 1990s. Fifty countries have had more than 3.5 percent per capita growth for a decade or more since 2000. Only 22 achieved this in the 1990s.

Along with growth, developing countries have seen a rapid expansion of domestic entrepreneurs and a middle class looking to make domestic markets more sustainable.

Along with growth, developing countries have seen a rapid expansion of domestic entrepreneurs and a middle class looking to make domestic markets more sustainable.

These changes suggest that more countries are in a better position to benefit from development cooperation than they were two decades ago. The post-2015 agenda will build on the foundations of progress achieved through the MDGs. Consider that between 2000 and 2011:

• The number of children out of school globally almost halved, from  102 million to 57 million;
• The share of emerging and developing economies in world exports rose from 23 percent to 37 percent;
• Domestic credit provided by the financial sector as a share of GDP in low income countries rose from 26 percent to 38 percent.

Of course progress has not been even and new challenges have arisen. With growth and urbanization, the demand for infrastructure has outstripped supply. In fact, expressed as a share of GDP, the public capital stock in low income countries has fallen by 30-40 percent since its peak in the mid-1980s. Low public investment in infrastructure, especially in many municipalities with growing populations, is now a bottleneck to further per capita income growth as well as a constraint on the transformation of economies to a low-carbon trajectory.

Today, it is necessary to plan for a planet with 8 billion people by 2030 and 9 billion by 2050—a planet that is more urban, more middle class, older, more connected, more interdependent, more vulnerable, more constrained in its natural resources. It will be a planet where more than half the world’s poor live in conflict-affected countries needing stronger institutions. A planet where natural disasters, that have already cost $2.5 trillion since 2000, will become more common. Where environmental assets—coastal fisheries, forests, pastures--that account for half the income of the extreme poor, come under growing stress.

You will hear much talk in 2015 about the need for a “new global partnership.” In practice, what this means is that national and international policies, and politics, should be guided by principles of equity, universality, solidarity, sustainability, human rights and responsibilities shared in accordance with capabilities. This is already the practice for EU member states, where it is a proud tradition that all new members make efforts to transition from aid recipients to aid donors, to set up their own development cooperation agency and policies, and to contribute actively to international development cooperation processes. Increasingly, this is also the practice for many middle-income countries as well—the BRICS, Turkey, Mexico and others--although their approaches to development cooperation may differ from those adopted by the members of the Development Assistance Committee.

With so many countries, businesses and civil society organizations now actively engaging with sustainable development, it is important to establish ground-rules for cooperation—doing things together--and for coordination--avoiding waste, overlap or gaps. Historically, official aid donors cooperate with each other by pooling financial and technical assistance in joint activities, often under the auspices of a multilateral organization. But truly global cooperation is rare and will probably continue to be rare. There are too many differences among countries in the national interest and foreign policy considerations that provide context to aid. So cooperation can, and does, work well among smaller groups of like-minded countries, like the EU, but is hard to attain at a global level.

Coordinating development is much easier to do than cooperating on development. Coordination means sharing information about activities in a way that allows others to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their work. For example, information on a country’s or a government’s total debt, from all sources, is needed to assess its creditworthiness and hence its ability to engage in more debt-financed spending. Information on future aid delivery is important to allow finance ministers to plan and budget appropriately. Information on the lessons of success and failure of specific development projects, including evaluations done by NGOs, can help improve the design of other projects. Monitoring progress towards the sustainable development targets can improve coordination for everyone interested in results. For all these reasons, the High-level Panel on the post-2015 agenda called for a data revolution as the basis of development coordination.

Of course, to provide information in a useable form, attention has to be paid to definitions and standards. This is why the discussions on modernizing official development assistance definitions, recently concluded among DAC members, is an important early achievement in the move towards sustainable development. The changes that have been adopted will direct aid resources to the poorest nations and allow rich countries more flexibility to use off-budget mechanisms like soft loans as an additional instrument of cooperation. They also introduce a new category of total official support for development in recognition of the idea that vastly more resources than aid will be required for the sustainable development goals to be achieved.

One the most important departures of the SDGs from the MDGs is this idea that aid alone will not be sufficient to get the job done. It is laudable and encouraging that even in this difficult fiscal environment many DAC countries have maintained or raised their aid levels. Raising aid to 0.7 percent of gross national income is a worthy endeavor. But even if somehow this promise were to be kept by all DAC countries, it would not be anywhere near enough. Aid would go up to $314 billion, compared to its actual level of $138 billion in 2013; but realistic estimates of the size of additional investment needs by developing countries are on the order of at least $1.5 trillion a year, or a 10 percent increase. So in thinking about aid allocations, we should also think about the possibility for using aid to catalyze funds from NGOs, philanthropists and the private business sector.

The Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing estimates that global public and private savings are in theory sufficient, but also notes that there are significant gaps in financing for specific sectors and for specific categories of countries.

One gap is for Least Developed Countries and other vulnerable groups like small island developing states and post-conflict countries. These countries are heavily reliant on grant aid. Looking forward, they will only get the needed resources from a combination of an increase in the volume of aid and a reallocation of aid away from middle-income countries that have other options. This process of reallocating aid towards the poorest nations is particularly challenging when aid is being given for the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. For example, the majority of the $30 billion in fast-start financing for climate change that was promised for 2010-2012 went to large middle-income countries, with India, Indonesia and Brazil topping the list, and Thailand, Philippines, South Africa, China and Mexico also included in the top 20 recipients of climate-related aid. With more aid likely to be committed toward climate change issues, it will not be straightforward to ensure that political commitments to allocate more to LDCs and SIDS will actually be realized.

A second gap is for lower middle-income countries. These countries have the smallest resources available for public spending relative to their GDP. Low income countries benefit from high aid levels. Upper middle-income countries have significant domestic tax bases to draw on. But lower middle-income countries are caught in between. They suffer from a sharp fall-off in access to aid before they have strong enough institutions to collect taxes effectively. For example, a country starts to be graduated from the International Development Association’s grants when per capita gross national income levels rise above $1,195. But, as a matter of practice, at this income level domestic tax authorities tend to still be weak. So total available funds for development investments falls, just at a time when urban infrastructure, demand for electricity for small and medium enterprises, and other pressing needs are rising.

In the 1980s, these lower middle-income countries could turn to public lending agencies like the World Bank for assistance, but today the World Bank and other multilateral development financing institutions are small—in 2013, the total net financial flows from the multilateral system were less than $22 billion. Many lower middle-income countries have the fiscal capacity to borrow more, but they are being forced to access private capital markets and pay high risk premiums. For example, Kenya issued 10-year bonds in mid-2014 at an interest rate of slightly less than 7 percent. Compare this to less than 1 percent charged by the World Bank. The money comes from the same sources—private savings—but through different channels. So there is a significant opportunity to take advantage of the liquidity and low interest rates available in private capital markets today and to on-lend those funds to lower middle-income countries at far lower cost than is currently being done.

There are many other possibilities especially in infrastructure where there is a long history of private financing. Infrastructure financing is a third major gap in today’s funding structures and is receiving a lot of attention.

This is only one example of how private saving can be used to support sustainable development. There are many other possibilities especially in infrastructure where there is a long history of private financing. Infrastructure financing is a third major gap in today’s funding structures and is receiving a lot of attention. In 2014 alone a half-dozen new infrastructure facilities were set up: the G-20’s Global Infrastructure Hub, the World Bank’s Global Infrastructure Facility, the African Development Bank’s Africa50 Fund, the BRICS’ New Development Bank, and the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Facility to name a few of the most prominent.

Each of these funds and facilities has identified a specific niche to ease one of the bottlenecks to more infrastructure finance, whether that be the supply of bankable projects, the presence of dedicated multi-skilled teams on the ground to bring projects over the finish line, the absence of sound regulatory and policy frameworks or the access to additional equity and debt finance, technical assistance or guarantees.

There is an understanding that enough infrastructure will not be built simply by relying on private initiative. Existing public-private partnerships in infrastructure have plateaued at a level of around $200 billion per year. But if they are to reach the scale that is necessary of at least $1 trillion, public agencies must be more proactive, including by ensuring that infrastructure, once built, is properly used and maintained.

The biggest contribution that business can make to the sustainable development goals is to provide jobs and market innovations, like inclusive value chains that include poor households in growth processes as consumers and producers. But too often businesses do not concern themselves with social and environmental sustainability without regulations that establish a level playing field.

There is no “correct” level of regulation for all countries. Much depends on the structure of markets and competitive forces in a given situation. But more and more firms, especially large firms, seem to be ready to adopt sustainable practices. It is time to move these firms from voluntary standards to systematic sustainable development accounting practices for all businesses. This is the idea behind the call by the United Nations Secretary General, in his synthesis report on the post-2015 agenda, for mandatory reporting standards on firms’ social and environmental footprints as well as on financial returns. It is high time for businesses to be held accountable for sustainable development by their shareholders, in accordance with standards set by public regulators in a dialogue with civil society.

Let me recap. Effective partnerships solve problems. The post-2015 agenda calls for a new global partnership, a new spirit of multilateralism to solve the pressing problems of our day. We should make three promises this year to the generations that will be born after 2030. First, by 2030, every child should start life in a family that is free of poverty and hunger, and should have access to the health, education, nutrition and other services that will give it a good start. Second, by 2030, every large firm and public agency should have social and environmental sustainability hardwired into their investment decisions. Third, by 2030, we should have strong multilateral institutions in place that can support sustainable development on a global scale.

If we can make these three promises in 2015, with credible plans for getting there by 2030, then we will indeed transition to “a developing world”.

If a genie had popped out of my coffee cup early one morning just after I had been invited to lead the 1990 World Development Report on Poverty and offered me one wish, what would I have asked for? My answer will seem obvious once it is recalled that as we set about our task all we had at our disposal was information on levels of poverty and their changes over time in barely a dozen countries. What was so desperately needed, and what I would have requested, was vastly more knowledge about the poor and how their well-being was, or was not, improving. The genie did not disappoint. He did not solve my immediate problem, but over the next 25 years the statistical foundation for understanding poverty as reported by the World Bank’s PovcalNet has been utterly transformed—with coverage now extending to 128 developing countries and including over 1,000 household surveys, an outcome not even dreamed of in 1990. This is not measurement for measurement’s sake, however. Thanks to these efforts, our grasp of the growth-inequality-poverty interplay and our appreciation of the factors—income and non-income, internal and external—affecting the well-being of poor households have taken giant steps forward.

A second, major advance is the proliferation of innovative, micro-interventions that are proving effective in reaching and benefitting the poor. Over the last two decades, safety nets, workfare programs, conditional cash transfers, microfinance and similar programs have sprung up in many guises in all parts of the developing world. Research has followed suit, and, in doing so, has demonstrated that concern about equity-efficiency trade-offs can often be overcome by careful consideration of the market imperfections that trap the poor. Measuring the benefits of these interventions has profited enormously from the emergence of rigorous impact evaluation, a development that could be so much more valuable for policy if it paid equal attention to costs, since benefits without costs is like, well, Little without Mirrlees.

The last 25 years have also seen a broadening of the concept of poverty. While WDR90 went beyond consumption as the sole dimension of living standards by encompassing, in particular, health status and educational attainment, other aspects—political voice, domestic violence, vulnerability to shocks, gender differences—have increasingly received attention. Often informed by qualitative techniques such as self-assessments, focus groups, and participant observation, these additional dimensions have brought color to the black-and-white of numbers, proved a valuable crosscheck on quantitative approaches, and contributed to the design and implementation of poverty programs.

How would these advances—in poverty statistics, micro-interventions, and a fuller characterization of poverty—have affected the WDR90 strategy? The first has, in the main, supported the 1990 report’s focus on broad-based, labor-using growth and making sure social services, especially primary health care and education, reach the poor. In contrast, had knowledge of the other two, especially the tidal wave of evidence on social protection programs, been available in 1990, the two-pronged strategy would certainly have been expanded to incorporate a third tine aimed at maintaining minimum living standards and protecting the poor by means of state-contingent transfers (pensions for the old), incentive-based transfers, support for market-based enterprise (micro-insurance), and more participatory delivery mechanisms.

The last quarter-century has witnessed a stunning decline in extreme poverty. Indeed, the Millennium Development Goal of halving the 1990 level was achieved five years before the target date of 2015. What will the next quarter century bring? The answer of course depends on what countries do. Current discourse in policy circles does not bode uniformly well. Thus, the attention presently given to “inclusive growth,” growth that benefits all segments of society, runs the risk of detracting from efforts to give special consideration to those in greatest need. And concern with the expanding absolute gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor, especially in countries like China and India where inequality has increased, has resulted in questions being raised about the continuation of policies that to date have proven successful in reducing poverty. Reassuringly, proposals for the Sustainable Development Goals retain the focus on extreme poverty and with good reason—a billion people, one in every seven, remain mired in a desperate fight for daily survival and we are now better equipped than ever to effectively lift them out of poverty.

Assuming countries persist with a poverty focus, what can we expect? WDR90 predicted correctly that sub-Saharan Africa would be the only region to see extreme poverty increase. In fact, by 2011 there were more poor people on the African continent than in either East Asia or South Asia. This outcome reflects the dismal performance in sub-Saharan Africa with respect to the two prongs of the 1990 strategy, compared with the tremendous progress in Asia. Circumstances, however, are changing. Sub-Saharan Africa’s recent growth acceleration, if sustained, will ensure substantial declines in poverty in the coming years, while slower growth will temper the rate of poverty reduction in Asia. In addition, China and other Asian countries will need to rely more heavily on the administratively challenging redistributive policies of the third prong to combat rising inequality and to reach the remaining poor, an increasing proportion of who will be those unable to participate in economic activity. Nevertheless, for the developing world as a whole, there is every prospect of eliminating extreme poverty within the next quarter century. However, there will be a sizeable residual remaining in countries ravaged by conflict or suffering from serious misgovernment (and hence incapable of implementing the original two prongs) and in those countries unable to provide adequate social protection for the poorest members of society (the third prong).

The United Nations will convene a major international conference on Financing for Development (FfD) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from July 13 to 16, 2015, to discuss financing for the post-2015 agenda on sustainable development. This conference, the third of its kind, will hope to replicate the success of the Monterrey conference in 2002 that has been credited with providing the glue to bind countries to the pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The analogy is pertinent but should not be taken too far. The most visible part of the Monterrey Consensus was the commitment by rich countries to “make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of gross national product” as official development assistance (ODA). This was anchored in a clear premise that “each country has primary responsibility for its own economic and social development,” which includes support for market-oriented policies that encourage the private sector. While not all of the Monterrey targets have been met, there has been a considerable increase in resources flowing to developing countries, as a central plank of efforts to achieve the MDGs.

Today, aid issues remain pivotal for a significant number of countries, but they are less relevant for an even larger number of countries. The core principles of Monterrey need to be reaffirmed again in 2015, but if the world is to follow-through on a universal sustainable development agenda, it must address the multi-layered financing priorities spanning all countries. A simple “30-30-130” mnemonic helps to illustrate the point. There are 193 U.N. member states. Of these, only around 30 are still low-income countries (33 at the latest count). These are the economies that are, and will continue to be, the most heavily dependent on aid as the world looks to how it should implement the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Conversely, there are only around 30 “donor” countries (including 28 members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, or DAC) that have made international commitments to provide more aid. For the remaining 130 or so emerging middle-income economies that have achieved higher levels of average prosperity, aid discussions risk forming a sideshow to the real issues that constrain their pursuit of sustainable development. The bottom line is that for most countries, the Financing for Development conference should unlock finance from many different sources, including but not exclusively aid, to implement the SDGs.

Addis will take place in the context of sluggish global growth, an upsurge in conflict, considerable strains in multilateral 2 political cooperation, and challenging ODA prospects in many countries.

There are other differences between Addis and Monterrey. Monterrey took place after agreement had been reached on the MDGs, while Addis will precede formal agreement on the SDGs by a few months. Monterrey was focused on a government-to-government agreement, while Addis should be relevant to a far larger number of stakeholders—including businesses, academics, civil society, scientists, and local authorities. Monterrey was held against a backdrop of general optimism about the global economy and widespread desire for intensified international collaboration following the terrorist events of September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, Addis will take place in the context of sluggish global growth, an upsurge in conflict, considerable strains in multilateral political cooperation, and challenging ODA prospects in many countries. In addition, regulators are working to reduce risk-taking by large financial institutions, increasing the costs of providing long-term capital to developing countries.

Against this backdrop, an Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Finance (ICESDF) crafted a report for the United Nations on financing options for sustainable development. The report provides an excellent overview of issues and the current state of global financing, and presents over 100 recommendations. But it falls short on prescribing the most important priorities and action steps on which leaders should focus at Addis.

This paper seeks to identify such a priority list of actions, with emphasis on the near-term deliverables that could instigate critical changes in trajectories towards 2030. At the same time, the paper does not aim to describe the full range of outcomes that need to be in place by roughly 2025 in order to achieve the SDGs by their likely deadline of 2030. Addis will be a critical forum to provide political momentum to a few of the many useful efforts already underway on improving global development finance. Time is short, so there is limited ability to introduce new topics or ideas or to build consensus where none already exists.

We identify three criteria for identifying top priorities for agreement in Addis:

• Priorities should draw from, and build on, on-going work—including the ICESDF report and the outputs „„of several other international workstreams on finance that are underway.
• Agreements should have significant consequences for successful implementation of the SDGs at the coun„„try, regional or global level.
• Recommendations should be clearly actionable, with next steps in implementation that are easy to under„„stand and easy to confirm when completed.

It is not necessary (or desirable) that every important topic be resolved in Addis. In practical terms, negotiators face two groups of issues. First are those on which solutions can be negotiated in time for the July conference. Second are those for which the problems are too complex to be solved by July, but which are still crucial to be resolved over the coming year or two if the SDGs are to be achieved. For this second group of issues, the intergovernmental agreement can set specific timetables for resolving each problem at hand. There is some precedent for this, including in the 2005 U.N. World Summit, which included timetables for some commitments. What is most critical is that the moment be used to anchor and advance processes that will shift toward creating a global financing system for achieving sustainable development across all countries. Committing to timetables for action and building on reforms already undertaken could be important ways of enhancing the credibility of new agreements.

In this paper, we lay out nine areas where we believe important progress can be made. In each area, we start from identifying a gap or issue that could present an obstacle to the successful implementation of the SDGs if left unattended. In some cases the gaps will affect all countries, in other cases only a subset of countries. But we believe that the package of actions, taken as a whole, reflects a balance of opportunities, responsibilities and benefits for all countries. We also believe that by making the discussion issue-focused, the needs for financing can be balanced with policy actions that will be required to make sure financing is effectively and efficiently deployed.

In addition to the nine areas listed below, there are other commitments already made which have not yet been met. We urge renewed efforts to meet these commitments, but also recognize that political and financial realities must be managed to make progress. Such commitments include meeting the Monterrey Consensus target to provide 0.7 percent of GNI in official development assistance (ODA), the May 2005 agreement of all EC-15 countries to reach that target by 2015, and bringing the Doha Development Round of trade talks to a successful conclusion. These remain important and relevant, but in this paper we choose to focus on new areas and fresh ideas so as to avoid treading over well-worn territory again.

Event Information

Transparency is one of the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC) four core principles of effective development assistance, along with good governance, country ownership, and a focus on results. The MCC scored first overall in the 2013 Publish What You Fund Aid Transparency Index, a measure that assesses 39 indicators by looking at organizations’ published data and their commitment to transparency.

On February 6, the Brookings Institution and the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) hosted MCC Vice President of the Department of Policy and Evaluation Beth Tritter to launch “Principles into Practice: Transparency,” the newest report in MCC’s “Principles into Practice” series. The report outlines six lessons the agency has learned from increasing transparency, and also examines key challenges for the future. After the short presentation of the report, Ms. Tritter sat for a panel discussion on donors’ experiences with becoming more transparent moderated by George Ingram, a senior fellow at Brookings and co-chair of MFAN.

Audio

• 06 transparency millenium challenge corporation

Editor’s Note: This blog is adapted from January 9 remarks given by Homi Kharas at the Kapuscinski Development Lecture in Riga, Latvia, which formally kicked off the European Year for Development 2015.

 The year 2015 will be a pivotal one for international development, so it is fitting that it has been designated as the first-ever European Year of Development. The year will be punctuated by four big events: the World Education Forum in Incheon will discuss how to improve the delivery of education, which is increasingly recognized as critical to addressing many of today’s most pressing social problems; the United Nation’s third international conference on financing for development in Addis Ababa will help create more effective financial channels that can handle the sizeable investments required to place economies on low-carbon trajectories; this year’s U.N. General Assembly will convene heads of state to agree on a set of sustainable development goals for the next 15 years; and there is great anticipation that the COP21 ministerial meeting in Paris can deliver agreement on combating climate change and its impacts. 2015 provides a historic opportunity for global political consensus to be reached on the contours of sustainable development.

Three fundamental shifts from traditional approaches to development cooperation mark the post-2015 agenda. The first shift is toward leaving no one behind—providing everyone on the planet with health, education, nutrition and consumption that reach a basic minimum standard and enable them to participate in the global economy. The second shift is toward a new growth pattern that sets countries on a path toward low-carbon growth by investing in sustainable infrastructure, especially energy, and by making governments and corporations accountable for their impact on sustainable development. And the third shift is toward a better-governed globalization, with rules for investment and trade that treat all countries fairly, and incentives to prevent overexploitation of natural resources.

Every country has a role to play in each of these shifts. The post-2015 agenda is universal: it starts with every country putting its own house in order and eliminating policies that work against sustainable development, like fossil fuel subsidies, tax loopholes, and legal discrimination. It continues with making smart public investment decisions, at home and abroad. And it means doing more research and encouraging more business innovation.

If we are sufficiently bold with the post-2015 agenda, we can promise that, by 2030: every child should start life free of poverty and hunger, with access to basic services; every large business and government agency should have hardwired social and environmental sustainability into their investment decisions; and that the relevant international institutions should be fit to support sustainable development on a global scale.

What must we do to deliver on these promises? The world needs an action plan to make this vision operational. Such an action plan will have to be built upon country-specific plans to incorporate the broader elements of the sustainable development goals framework into national and even sub-national strategies and budgets. It would also have global plans to make sure that plans are adequately financed and are based on the best available technology, and that sponsor research and innovation to investigate how to do better in areas like peace, inclusiveness and resilience where countries still struggle with knowing how to move forward effectively.

Inevitably, an action plan needs to have responsibilities and resources spelled out. The post-2015 agenda hinges upon the development of a new global partnership, a new spirit of multilateralism to solve our most challenging problems. Sectoral and country-based partnerships between governments, private sector investors, philanthropies and civil society will be needed to ensure that the agenda moves beyond aid, to include policy issues ranging from regulations governing sustainable production and consumption patterns, to the sharing of tax information, and control of illicit financial flows.

We are entering a new phase of development, in which sustainable development is not just something for developing countries to attempt, but something that is critical for all economies to work toward. This transition from “the” developing world to “a” developing world must begin now. 2015 provides a window of opportunity in which international attention has coalesced around the issues of sustainable development. The four momentous international gatherings will provide political and intellectual momentum throughout the year. Together, these events offer our best chance to create a road map for a developing world.