59th Annual DPI/NGO Conference 2006

Unfinished Business: Effective Partnerships for Human Security and Development

On September 6th, 7th and 8th, approximately 2500 people representing 540 non-governmental organizations and more than 90 countries met at the United Nations Department of Information’s (DPI) annual conference in New York City. The conference, marking the 59th year of meetings between the DPI and the NGO community, aimed to strengthen collaborations between civil society and global institutions in an effort to accelerate progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Over the three day period, a diverse group of speakers, including grassroots leaders, UN officials, government representatives, academics, artists, and businesspeople, presented a series of plenary sessions, roundtable discussions, and workshops to exchange ideas and expertise. Issues ranged from the role of gender in security and development to interfaith cooperation for peace to new communication technologies for addressing social change and reacting to disasters. While there were many more sessions scheduled than there were WHY staff to attend them, we have highlighted some of the general themes and more prominent projects below. Stay tuned in the coming weeks when we will post more in-depth analyses of the conference and updates on the international effort to meet the MDGs.

A More Complex Vision for Measuring Progress in Development

The opening keynote address was itself a remarkable event. Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of his country who is himself actively engaged in an alternative pathway of development, had been called to address this UN assembly by teleconference. In fact, Evo Morales could not appear but his vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera delivered a set of challenges on Morales’ behalf: to think of paths of development that provide wealth as a universal property not belonging to any one group, to respect different paths to development that do away with neo-colonialism and measure well being on the basis of individual cultures, and to observe the right of universal access to and use of world knowledge and goods. Linera emphasized that the last 50 years of development have shown us that we must recognize the human, natural and structural limits inherent in an industrial and consumerist model of development: there are simply not enough resources for every person to have a refrigerator, a cell phone, and a car. But he also cautioned against the tendency to neglect countries and freeze them in poverty under the premise of respecting their own methods of developing. Instead, we must separate paths of development from any tendency to domination, subordination and extortion, and meld them with the virtues of pluralism and diversity. This creative synthesis would help countries as diverse as Bolivia and Thailand find their own individualized development along with access to world knowledge This process will provide the world with a more complex vision and a new way of measuring progress.

A Commitment to Reducing Extreme Poverty and Hunger: Debt Relief and The Millennium Villages

Debt Relief
Debt relief is central to realizing the MDGs. Many poor countries are spending more on debt interest payments than on social needs such as health care and education. We learned at the DPI Conference that within the alphabet-soup of international development jargon sits an acronym that needs more attention. According to Alvaro Umaña, the Counselor of Costa Rica at the Inter-America Development Bank, MICs (middle income countries) are getting lost in the focus on debt relief to HIPCs (heavily indebted poor countries) as the key to lifting countries out of poverty.

More than 70% of the poor in Latin America live in MICs with high debt ratios. Paraguay, for example, has a per capita income just above the cut off point to be eligible for borrowing from the World Bank and IMF. But these countries are also in need of assistance.

Umaña emphasized the need to explore other ideas, such as debt swaps, soft loans, and performance and incentive-based programs that work more on the results of what a country can achieve with debt relief. Despite concerns about debt relief leading to irresponsible spending, studies have shown that the impact has been positive in terms of social expenditure and that spending has not been wasteful. According to the IMF, reduction of a debt burden from 10% to 5% of GDP can boost a country’s social expenditure by 1%, money that ideally could be used in support of the MDGs.

Umaña challenged the audience with a bold idea: that countries which reduce their military spending should receive more money to spend on achieving the MDGs. And with the number of UN peacekeeping forces doubling in the last five years, bold ideas might be exactly what the UN needs to refocus itself on development and achieve the ambitious goals set six years ago.

The Millennium Villages

Prior to 2004, the community of Sauri in Western Kenya looked like an African village ravaged by hunger and poverty. Forty-two percent of the children were underweight and suffering from severe malnutrition and chronic hunger. The number of residents infected with malaria had reached almost 50% and was expected to grow, and drinking water was scarce. Very few children were provided with school lunches - the only reliable source of food for many of them each day. But just two years later, things are looking up thanks to the Millennium Villages project, a concept developed by a team of scientific experts at The Earth Institute at Columbia University and the UN Millennium Project. The project is ambitious, to say the least, and still very young. Yet so far, it seems to be producing results.

Today, the community of Sauri has more than doubled the food output of recent harvests and the school lunch program has been extended to all school children in the community, resulting in greater attendance. The community now has a health clinic supported by medical experts, and insecticide-treated bed nets distributed to the entire community resulted in a significant reduction in the number of new malaria cases. The Sauri Water Committee, composed of local residents, has rehabilitated four out of the 37 contaminated water springs.

How did it happen? The project abandons the more piecemeal approach to development in which a person may receive health care, but still suffer from hunger, or may find access to clean water, but cannot protect themselves against malaria, and provides for strategic and comprehensive interventions on the barriers to development. It is the most ambitious of community-led makeovers, attacking the poverty trap from the bottom up by investing in health, food production, education, access to clean water, and essential infrastructure all at once. The belief is that once these communities get a foothold on the bottom rung of the development ladder they can propel themselves on a path of self-sustaining economic growth and be well on their way to meeting the MDGs by 2015.

There are some important questions that must be asked about this ambitious project. Can it be truly self-sustaining in the current international economic framework? Is there an appropriate transfer of technology that respects the different development paths referred to by Bolivian Vice President Garcia Linera? Are the farm inputs that are being used to enhance agricultural productivity sustainable, so as not to repeat past problems of the Green Revolution? How will changes in local governance affect the long-term success of the villages?

And the costs are not insignificant at $110 per person per year until 2015, with $10 coming from the villagers themselves, usually in the form of labor; $30 coming from the home governments via health and agriculture extension services and $70 coming from donor committees (broken down into $50 from the Millennium Project itself and $20 from partner organizations and NGOs).

With operations in more than 75 villages in ten different countries, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda, the biggest challenge for the program now is how to “scale up” and ensure that the success of these first few trial villages both sustains and can be applied in other locations across the continent and the world.

Unfinished Business

“Unfinished Business”, as we saw from this conference, describes the current state of global efforts to meet the MDGs. Civil society, governments, business, and UN agencies need new energies, new partnerships, and new paradigms if we are to move toward a more just and sustainable world.

For more information on the conference, the MDGs and other topics discussed here, please visit:

UN Conference
59th Annual DPI/NGO Conference
Kofi Annan’s closing statement

MDGs
Millennium Development Goals
Millennium Villages

Debt Relief
The ONE Campaign
Jubilee USA