Since their adoption more than 13 years ago, significant and substantial progress has been made in meeting many of the eight Millennium Development Goals, including visible improvements in all health areas as well as primary education, and halving the number of people living in extreme poverty. However, progress is uneven, particularly for women and girls, and in many areas far from sufficient.
According to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2013, launched on 1 July by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, too many women around the world are still dying in childbirth when we have the means to save them; only 53 per cent of births in rural areas are attended by skilled health personnel. In developing regions, women are more likely than men to work as contributing family workers on farms or other family businesses, with little or no financial security or social benefits.
The report also acknowledges that persisting gender-based inequalities in decision-making continue to deny women a say in the decisions that affect their lives.
Find out more about how women and girls are faring in progress towards each of these goals, and UN Women efforts towards meeting the MDGs by the end of 2015.
Source: UN Women
The leaders of seven multilateral organizations have issued a joint appeal for global support of a report issued by a high-level UN panel that calls for ending extreme poverty and promoting sustainable development.
In a joint letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on July 9, the seven leaders – who lead the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, European Investment Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group – offered their support for the panel’s findings. This includes contributions their institutions could make to implementation at the country level, of knowledge for development, a robust financing framework, and a “data revolution” that would enable broader public debate, as well as more evidence-based policies, and increased accountability.
The high-level panel recommends five transformative shifts in the approach to development: leaving no one behind; putting sustainable development at the core; transforming economies for jobs and inclusive growth; building peace and effective, open and accountable institutions; and forging a new global partnership.
“We strongly endorse the vision ‘to end poverty in all its forms, in the context of sustainable development and to have in place the building blocks of sustained prosperity for all’…We see investments in people, growth, and structural change as driving forces,” said the heads of the institutions, supporting a development agenda that takes into full the human, environmental and economic dimensions of development.
“We endorse ideas of…provision of economic and social infrastructure and the development of a thriving private sector, which in turn provide the growth and jobs that help to end poverty,” they added, in recognition of a stronger partnership needed between government, the private sector and civil society.
The leaders strongly encouraged full achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, and rapid convergence of ongoing discussions around a single set of goals post-2015, a move that would allow governments and donor partners to start building implementation strategies to achieve such goals.
Source: EBRD
Data on Millennium Development Goals (MDG) indicator trends for developing countries and for different groups of countries are curated in the World Development Indicator (WDI) database. Each year we use these data in the Global Monitoring Report (GMR) to track progress on the MDGs. Many colleagues, as well as non-Bank staff, approach us on a weekly basis with questions regarding where their region, or country, or sector stands in regard to achieving the core MDGs. Oftentimes in the same breath, they will also ask us whether or when we expect that a particular country or region will meet a certain MDG.
With less than 1,000 days remaining to the MDG deadline, work on the Post-2015 agenda is in full swing. In response to the growing demand for additional info about GMR analytics and the underlying data, we developed a suite of open and interactive data diagnostics dashboards available at: http://data.worldbank.org/mdgs. Below is an extract which summarizes the progress status towards meeting various MDGs among countries in various regions, income and other groups. Select different indicators and highlight categories of progress status to interact with the visualization.
Source: World Bank
On 9 July 2013 Transparency International (TI) released its 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, the largest worldwide public opinion survey on corruption. Surveying 114,000 people across 107 countries, the Global Corruption Barometer highlights people’s direct experiences with bribery in their home countries and opinions on corruption in public, private, and religious institutions.
Some of TI’s findings include:
- Twenty-seven percent of respondents have paid a bribe when accessing public services and institutions in the last 12 months.
- Two-thirds of those who were asked to pay a bribe had refused.
- In 2008 31 percent of respondents said their government’s efforts to fight corruption were effective. This year it fell to 22 per cent.
- Nearly 9 in 10 people said they would act against corruption.
When comparing the results of TI’s Corruption Barometer with the IBP’s Open Budget Index, there is some correlation between countries that have a lower perception of corruption and those that have more budget transparency. Increasing budget transparency in countries that have a higher perception of corruption can be one way to close the loop to help stem corruption.
Source: Transparency International and IBP
Read more on the following link: http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013/report
22 May 2013: A report from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) calls for integrating human rights standards in post-2015 goals, saying discussion of the post-2015 development agenda is an “unmissable opportunity” to address lack of accountability and unfulfilled development commitments regarding the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The report, titled 'Who Will Be Accountable? Human Rights and the Post-2015 Development Agenda,' is co-published by OHCHR and the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR). The report says that drawing on human rights norms and mechanisms will strengthen the accountability of the responsible actors for fulfilling development commitments; create the conditions for people, including the poor and marginalized, to participate meaningfully in public decision making; and allow cases of failure to fulfill development commitments to be brought before national and international human rights mechanisms.
The authors highlight current difficulty in holding industrialized countries to account for commitments made to the global partnership for development (MDG 8). They suggest that human rights violations may be addressed through judicial as well as non-judicial mechanisms, with the latter including parliamentary committees, administrative hearings, service delivery grievance procedures, citizen consultation groups and community-based accountability systems.
The authors call for the post-2015 development framework to reflect “freedom from fear” as well as “freedom from want,” based on the principles of equity, equality and non-discrimination. They propose that achieving equality should be a stand-alone goal, and also integrated across all other goals, and that monitoring mechanisms for the MDGs and possible new sustainable development goals (SDGs) should be integrated with national monitoring of public policies. They note that global goals and targets need not be the same as national planning targets that could be specifically tailored to national circumstances.
Source: UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
