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Five Years to a Better World?

Start your watches! With only five years until deadline, time is ticking for the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to be delivered – 189 countries aiming to halve global poverty, among other ambitious targets.

There have been some real success stories throughout the developing world in the last ten years (and the stats sure paint a nice picture), but I’ve read a few articles lately that call into question how much impact these goals have made. Have a few words spoken (by delegates in New York) nearly a decade ago really translated into change in Sub-Saharan Africa or the slums of Central Asia?

Let’s get into the numbers. As this article in The Economist was quick to point out, the world population that lives on less than $1.25 per day – the recognized poverty line – dropped from 46 per cent in 1990 to 27 per cent in 2005. But what looks like a massive achievement was made with no thanks to the money, which industrialized countries had pledged to put towards foreign aid. Real credit goes to the emerging Asian economies.

Our generation never knew China before its colossal-mammoth-insane economic explosion — which is why it came as a huge surprise to me to find out that between 1990 and 2005, its poverty rate dropped almost 50 per cent. Crazy! Absolutely Crazy! China and India, having grown so much economically, are what’s pushing the global poverty rate down, while the world’s poor elsewhere (Africa especially) face more or less the same conditions they always have.

That’s not to say that there have been no successes in development aid. From what I’ve read, the general consensus these days is that the best projects are those that help struggling people to help themselves. I watched a really interesting video the other day, another from RSA Animate, which went into the implications of “temporary” charity. It’s pretty eye opening, and what I think it comes down to is this:

Instead of walking off a plane in Kenya or Namibia to deliver crates of rice and medical supplies, for example, the payoff would be better to encourage the country’s own agriculture, their own doctors, etc. Helping these developing countries stimulate their own economies is the only way to ensure that the changes are really sticking around. The concept of foreign aid, as it used to be, doesn’t cut it anymore.

It’s like trying to put a hockey stick back together after it’s been snapped with Duct tape. We can do our best with a temporary solution. We could try to take a system that’s splintered and broken, and hold it together. But the reality is right there in front of us — we need a new one.