UN hails impressive gains on education and reducing child mortality in Africa

Tuesday September 29, 2015

A Catholic elementary school at Adaga, Tigray, in Ethiopia. Africa has made great gains on primary school enrolment since 2000. Photograph: Sean Sprague/Alamy

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Millennium development goals report says African leaders must build on progress, seek fresh finance and beef up data to meet the new global goals.

When African leaders return home after this month’s UN summit in New York, they must be ready to implement innovative policies, seek fresh financing and beef up their data if they hope to build on progress made over the past 15 years and turn the sustainable development goals into reality, according to a new report.

Assessing African countries’ progress in implementing the millennium development goals, the report hailed “impressive gains” on enrolment in primary schools, women’s political representation, reducing child and maternal deaths, and cutting the prevalence of HIV and Aids.
Ayodele Odusola, chief economist at the UN Development Programme’s regional bureau for Africa, said that although the region had missed many MDG targets, absolute progress had been one of the best in the world given difficult initial conditions.

“The adoption of the MDGs galvanised action and development work in the continent, and as a result you see a kind of harmony across policy actions … Without the MDGs, it would have been pretty difficult for us to move in this trajectory,” he said, noting that although poverty across the region, excluding North Africa, had only fallen from 56.5% to 48.4% between 1990 and 2010, success in individual countries had been greater.

Egypt, South Africa, Botswana, Guinea, Swaziland and Namibia had managed to cut poverty rates by more than 50% since 1990, while Senegal, Uganda, Mauritania, Ghana, Niger, Ethiopia, Cameroon and Mali had cut poverty by around 40%, Odusola said.

But if African countries wanted to move forward on the much-broader SDG agenda, Odusola said, they would have to prioritise.

“We need to focus on the issue of managing trade-offs because there are so many goals and they may not be moving in the same direction. You want to create jobs, address exclusion and poverty. You have to make sure when you are implementing your green growth strategy that those people who are likely to be left behind are effectively taken care of,” he said.

The report was compiled by the African Union Commission, the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank and the UNDP’s Africa bureau, and sought to highlight innovative and successful policies from the MDG era in order to inform action over the next 15 years.

“It is our hope that publicising such success stories will not only help document policy innovations for SDG implementation, but also keep the focus on the unfinished business of the MDGs as countries and the global community make the transition to implementation of the post-2015 development agenda,” it said.

Among these success stories was a pioneer health programme in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, where village networks of community health volunteers gave advice and training on malaria and general health matters; the School for Husbands initiative in Niger where men and health officials meet twice a month to discuss women’s reproductive health; and the establishment of community-run and -funded schools in Burundi and Togo.

Overall, key to future success will be the buzzword of the past few frenetic days in New York: sustainability. Nothing illustrates this better, perhaps, than the events of the last 18 months in west Africa.

“The Ebola crisis has reminded us how quickly progress can unravel when health systems are not resilient to shocks. It has underlined the importance of complementing targeted health interventions with integrated approaches which strengthen healthcare systems overall,” the report said.
The new all-encompassing SDG agenda will also demand a new approach to financing. Odusola said the role of official development assistance (ODA) had been “over-emphasised” during the MDG era.

“We have to focus more on domestic resource mobilisation and then use ODA to catalyse development … We need to advocate for a substantial proportion of ODA to help countries mobilise domestic resources… to build countries’ capacities to generate internal revenues [that will] drive growth and development,” he said.

However, he acknowledged that some low-income countries did not yet have enough domestic resources, and needed to be supported while capacity is built.

“The role of the private sector, foundations and other emerging partners becomes quite critical to bridge the gap … We are proposing blended finance, a combination of ODA with private sector engagement,” he said.

Some campaigners warn blended finance could see states shirk their responsibility on aid, and question whether private sector investors are really motivated to reduce poverty.
The report also highlighted enduring problems, including food security. Around 25% of people in Africa faced hunger and malnutrition from 2011 to 2013 due to conflicts, droughts and flooding.

“In addition, the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone has increased food inflation in the three countries and the subregion, threatening to push many people below the minimum level of dietary energy consumption,” it said.

Although gross domestic product has remained positive since 2001, and above the global average, most of it can be attributed to extractive industries, including minerals, oil and gas. This has not created enough jobs, especially for young people.
“Responding to the youth unemployment challenge is vital if Africa is to derive a dividend from the youth bulge. Owing to a lack of decent jobs, most of the population in Africa is engaged in vulnerable employment, which is largely concentrated in the informal sector,” the report said.

Echoing widespread calls during the SDG summit in New York for improved data collection, Odusola said much of the data used in the report had a two- or three-year lag: most countries’ latest figures referred to 2010, with no country able to supply statistics from 2013/14.

“The capacity of our national statistical organisations needs to be beefed up … Governments can coordinate and drive the process but the private sector and the international development organisations need to come on board to take advantage of the data revolution.”

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