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"But the truth is this. Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century.
Yet in poor countries, pregnancy and childbirth kill a woman every minute –
so two women have died since I started speaking - they die with no trained
midwife or doctor to help."
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/news/files/Speeches/global-economic-gov-prog.asp
Speech
Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for International Development,
University College, Oxford University
'Towards 2015: Can the Millennium Development Goals Be Realised? '
10 October 2006
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Thanks Ngaire [Woods] and Kevin [Watkins]. I’m very pleased to speak
here and on this subject – you run an excellent and well respected
programme – touching many of the issues of global governance.
And Kevin, I’m looking forward to the launch of the UNDP 2006 Human
Development Report – it is right that it focuses on water because water is
so important to poor people, and especially girls. And without action on
water, the other Millennium Development Goals will not be achieved.
So what is the challenge we face?
Our small and fragile planet is shared by over 6 billion people – a
human family that is more interdependent that at any time in its history –
and a family that has, for the first time, the capacity to make sure that
every one of them is lifted out of poverty.
But the truth is this. Here we are at the beginning of the 21st
century. Yet in poor countries, pregnancy and childbirth kill a woman every
minute – so two women have died since I started speaking - they die with no
trained midwife or doctor to help.
A world where four million children die each year in their first month
of their short life. And half of all child deaths are the result of
malnutrition.
Where dirty water and inadequate sanitation kill 6,000 children each
and every day.
And where each year, every year, malaria kills one million people,
tuberculosis two million people, AIDS three million people. Every one of
them a soul extinguished.
300 million people live in fragile states. In Afghanistan, one in four
children die before the age of five. Life expectancy is only 44 years. In
Somalia there has been no government for 15 years and 80% of children have
never seen the inside of a classroom.
While globally we will meet the poverty reduction millennium
development goal, it’s mainly because of progress in China and India, there’
s a huge challenge in Africa which saw poverty rise in the last decade. In
education, we are not on course to achieve equal enrolment of girls and boys
by 2015, and net enrolment worldwide may only be around 87%. And given that
over 270 million children worldwide have no access to healthcare, we are not
on track to meet the child mortality goal.
And in water, as Kevin could tell us, we need to bring clean water to
300,000 people each day, every day for the next ten years to meet the goal.
That’s like supplying water to the cities of Edinburgh, Belfast, Cardiff and
Birmingham, every week, every month, every year for the next decade. In
sanitation we have to double our current global effort.
And all of this is taking place in a world that is rapidly changing. A
generation of teenagers is entering the workforce in developing economies.
By 2010, 733 million more people will be of working age, compared to 50
million in the rich world. Many of them will migrate, internally and abroad,
in search of a better life.
Within three decades, the urban populations of Africa, Asia and Latin
America will double to nearly four billion human beings. By 2020, the
majority of Asian men and women will live in towns and cities. Ten years
later, the same will be true of most Africans.
The economic and political landscape is changing – by the middle of
this century, countries like China, Brazil and India, will play a much
stronger role than they do now.
Climate Change – hardest felt by those least responsible for it –
developing countries – has the potential to cause untold damage and harm far
beyond the reach of any aid programme.
And while some countries are trading more, and are benefiting from and
helping to create rising global prosperity, others are left behind,
particularly in sub-Saharan Africa which saw its share of world trade
decline from 6% to 2% over the past two decades. The Doha Round, which was
meant to address all this, shames us all as it lies stalled while each of
the big trading blocks waits for the other to move. To do the right thing.
We do face huge challenges but we should take hope from the progress
that is being made.
In the past 40 years, life expectancy in the developing world
increased by a quarter.
In the past 30 years, illiteracy has fallen by half.
In the past 20 years, 400 million human beings lifted out of absolute
poverty.
Just last month I was in Vietnam where poverty fell from three
quarters in the late 1980s to under a third in 2002, with extreme poverty
half of that – the fastest reduction in poverty in any country in the world.
We’ve beaten smallpox, and we are nearly there with polio.
And last year the world came together and agreed to do more. The
Commission for Africa report, the Gleneagles G8, the Make Poverty History
campaign, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, the millennium summit.
And we achieved a great deal.
The G8 agreed $50 billion extra in aid, with $25 billion to Africa, by
2010. And we agreed a new target of by 2010 access for all to AIDS
treatment. Free basic education and health care. Better ways of dealing with
conflict.
We have made progress on a number of things. Take two. The debt of 20
countries has been fully cancelled, over $81 billion. This is new money
available for investment in education or health or infrastructure. The
International Finance Facility for Immunisation was launched to help save
the lives of an additional 5 million children over the next decade, and
bonds will be issued later this month.
True, we have not made poverty history, but we are making progress,
step by step. The challenge for all of us is to make good on our
commitments.
And that includes the commitment to good governance. That’s what our
white paper was really about.
Good governance starts and finishes with developing countries
themselves.
Development doesn’t happen without effective states, capable of
delivering services to their citizens and helping economies to grow. States
that respond to peoples’ needs and which, in turn, can be held to account.
While we will continue to help build the capacity of public
institutions for good governance in developing countries, we will now do
more at the grassroots to reinforce the demand for good governance.
We are setting up a new £100 million Governance and Transparency Fund
to do this, and have launched consultation on its design. It will support
civil society, a free media, parliamentarians and trade unions in improving
accountability.
To ensure that our aid is used to best effect, we not only evaluate
its effectiveness, but will in future regularly assess the quality of
governance, transparency and commitment to reducing poverty in the countries
in which we work. We will publish these assessments. We all know that bad
governance and corruption are international problems too. Earlier this year
the Prime Minister asked me to take on the responsibility of leading the UK
fight against international corruption, working with other UK ministers, and
with the international community.
Our new Anti-Corruption Action Plan aims to do more in four areas –
a.. to investigate and prosecute bribery overseas;
b.. eliminate money laundering and recover stolen assets;
c.. promote responsible business conduct in developing countries,
and
d.. support international efforts to fight corruption.
As a first step, we will create a new Overseas Corruption Unit by
November this year. And it’ll be staffed by both the Metropolitan Police,
and City of London Police. It will help the UK increase its capacity to
investigate and prosecute those guilty of these crimes. We’ve also made
progress with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Since its
launch in 2002 more than twenty countries have signed up to implement the
EITI. Two countries are now reporting regularly - Azerbaijan and Nigeria. A
further three have produced EITI reports - Guinea, Gabon, Kyrgyzstan, and we
expect four more to report by the end of 2006 - Ghana, Cameroon, Kazakhstan
and Mauritania.
We will continue to support EITI, politically, financially and
technically, and to encourage all resource rich countries to implement the
initiative. We will also sponsor a UN General Assembly Resolution to make
EITI an international standard of good management. And we hope other
countries will support us in this.
The ultimate test of global good governance will be about how we
manage sustainable development in this world of population growth, rapid
urbanisation, the depletion of natural resources, and climate change.
Climate change will have major impact - rising sea levels will cause –
some people say - a tenth of Bangladesh’s population to have to move home –
equivalent to more than all the people who live in Greater London.
In sub-Saharan Africa, where a third of men, women and children are
already malnourished, climate change could mean that food production is
reduced by a fifth. Higher temperatures and shorter rainy seasons in
Tanzania are expected to cut the main food crop, maize, by a third, making
more people even more hungry. Even poorer.
Competition over natural resources already causes conflict. Climate
change will make this worse. By 2025, only 20 years away, more than 3
billion people could be affected by serious water shortages. Some argue –
the UNDP report might - that we need a new agricultural revolution for
water – a “blue revolution” to ensure the gains in food production are not
wiped out as rivers run dry and underground reservoirs empty.
Our interest in all of this is that climate change is a problem caused
by the rich countries which is having the greatest impact on poor countries.
We cannot ignore the impact of our own actions on the climate, nor can we
deny developing countries the chance to grow and to reduce poverty.
The truth is if we if we don’t do something about climate change, aid
from rich countries will look pitiful by comparison with the consequences
and the costs for developing countries.
So, what can we do?
The task for all of us, here at home, or abroad, remains the same – we
must stabilise greenhouse gases at a level which avoids dangerous climate
change. This is very ambitious, it will take time, and it requires action
from all of us. And the main way we’ll achieve it is to get international
agreement to commitments for the period after 2012. Everyone – rich and poor
countries - must be signed up to this agreement if it is to be effective.
Last year - 2005 - Gleneagles – was all about getting agreement on the
science of climate change. This battle has largely been won – even former
sceptics now agree that climate change is real, and that human activity is
making it worse.
This year we want to get agreement on the economics – understanding
the implications and coming up with sound, rational policies for reducing
the impact and helping countries adapt to what we know will happen in the
most cost-effective and equitable way.
This is what the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, due
out soon, is all about.
At the same time, countries are not going to sign up to commitments if
they do not have the finances or the technical capacity to meet them. So, we
need to increase public and private investment in lower-carbon energy and
energy efficiency, and work to expand the development of technologies that
will help all of us use less carbon. We are working with the World Bank and
regional development banks on this.
Finally, whatever we do from now on, some climate change - due to
current and historical greenhouse gas emissions – will happen anyway, so we
are working with developing countries to help them adapt and build
resilience to changes.
Just as good governance or climate change requires international
action for progress to be made, so to do we need to do more to make the
international development system work better in the 21st Century.
But when we look at the principal institutions of multilateralism –
the United Nations, the IMF and World Bank, the World Trade Organisation,
the European Union – their chief characteristic is that they all emerged out
of the end of the Second World War. They were built for the challenges of 50
years ago; to re-build war torn Europe and Japan and to prevent the cold war
becoming a third world war.
If we were going to create this system now, it would look much
different.
First, we have got to move quicker on reform of the United Nations –
changes to the membership of the Security Council so that our changed world
is better represented – but also in its development work.
Gordon Brown was appointed by Kofi Annan to work on a high level panel
to review how the United Nations development system can better meet the
challenges of the 21st Century. And developing countries have had a strong
voice in the consultation process.
The aim is to create an effective UN that takes its rightful place at
the heart of the multilateral development system. The report will be
published on 9th November.
The UN must speed up existing reforms in order to establish:
a.. one integrated UN country team with one leader,
b.. one programme that supports national priorities,
c.. one budgetary framework that allows member states to plan
within known financial limits and, where appropriate,
d.. one office.
Changes proposed for the main UN organisations need to support this
vision of “One UN” and donors must provide more reliable and predictable
funding to realise it.
We are also making progress on integrating the UN humanitarian system
so that it responds faster when crisis strikes. In the past, the UN has
operated like an unfunded fire service - imagine the local fire station here
rushing around when there is a fire – not to put it out, but to raise the
money they need so that they can do so!
Well this year we’ve set up a new UN Central Emergency Response Fund.
The Fund, of which the UK is the largest donor at £40m a year over the next
4 years, has so far received $274 million from 54 donors since its launch.
This is already helping to ensure a quicker response when emergencies
strike, and the channelling of money to forgotten emergencies that are out
of the media spotlight.
The international financial institutions need to reform too. The IMF
and the World Bank have done much to improve their effectiveness, and are
doing more now to address their legitimacy. Last month in Singapore the IMF
took the first steps in a process of reform. I welcome this and we will
continue to support developing countries to ensure this reform delivers its
stated objective of increasing their voice and participation in the Fund.
The Bank must now also return to this issue and agree changes that
give the poorest countries a real say in the policies and programmes that
affect them. Ensuring they have the space to take forward and be responsible
for their own development – it’s about how much countries “own” the
programmes that are supported by the World Bank.
That’s why I recently announced I was considering withholding money
from the Bank - because I felt they needed to demonstrate that they had
improved their approach to conditionality.
Increasing voice also means it needs to be listened to. It’s a point
you have made Ngaire, and I think we need to do more to develop the right
incentives for these institutions to do so.
Finally, our aid will be more effective if we can help reform the
international development system – and in ways that improve governance and
not undermine it – making countries more accountable to their citizens,
rather than to us, their donors.
It’s hard for poor countries to plan for long-term investments when
much aid is so unreliable. Some studies show that is four times as volatile
as tax revenues in developing countries. And it gets worse, the more aid
dependent a country is. It’s why we are working hard to agree long-term
commitments with the countries we work with, and why we are trying to
persuade others to do the same.
We have new 10-year agreements in Rwanda, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Gordon Brown and myself have committed DFID to increasing our support to
education over the next 10 years to £8.5 billion – with 10 year funding
already agreed with Mozambique and Ghana. At the World Bank meetings in
Singapore we discussed 10-year education plans from 15 African countries,
and the European Commission is reviewing its approaches to budget support.
All with the purpose of making our aid more predictable.
Another challenge, however, is the need to finance recurrent costs.
Much aid is short term and is focused on capital investment. But it’s no
good building schools or clinics without having the teachers and nurses to
staff them – there is a staffing crisis now, and it will only get worse. And
rapidly expanding water provision also means increased operation and
maintenance costs. Social security payments that protect the vulnerable,
mean on-going cash support.
We know that it will take many years for poor countries – decades in
the case of those most dependent on aid - to grow their economies
sufficiently to provide the resources they need, through tax, to pay these
recurrent costs.
Clearly we need to do more to help countries achieve faster growth,
but I’d also like the Bank and the Fund to take a longer term view of the
financing needs of those countries furthest away from the Millennium
Development Goals. We have to bite the bullet and accept that we need to be,
and will be, supporting the efforts of these countries for a long time to
come.
And we need to make the international development system more
accountable. One proposal we have made is to have an independent
organisation monitor aid commitments, allocations and performance. The OECD
Development Assistance Committee could do this, but it would need more
capacity.
We also need to make sure that different sectors – education, health,
water and others – report on progress and funding needs so that the whole
international community is bought to account for helping countries meet the
Millennium Development Goals. And this will also mean overcoming the unequal
way aid is distributed, which leaves some countries unaided.
So, that’s what’s on my mind. What’s on yours?
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Received on Wed Nov 1 12:52:52 2006
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