Development: Post-2015 Agenda

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, for this opportunity to discuss the post-2015 international development agenda. She has raised some very interesting issues which I am sure will be discussed further in this Chamber and the other place over the coming months in the run-up to the negotiations.

The current MDGs already implicitly embrace an inequality agenda. As has been demonstrated many times, reducing income poverty will be much more successful if growth is accompanied by declining inequality. This is even clearer in the case of the non-income MDGs. Universal primary education or massive reductions in mortality cannot be achieved without reducing inequality in health and education. The rich, healthy and educated are already doing well on mortality and education indicators, and further improvements for them will simply not even come close to achieving the large reductions called for by the MDGs. Reducing income, education and health inequality is therefore a critical means to achieving the MDGs. In that sense, a separate inequality goal seems redundant.

The MDGs were quite successful in generating a global consensus by focusing on acute deprivations suffered by people across the developing world and formulating goals to overcome those deprivations. It was possible to forge a consensus on reducing poverty, undernutrition and mortality, improving education and increasing access to water and sanitation. This was a great achievement in that the world community agreed on a common set of indicators that described human well-being in its multidimensional complexity—something to be welcomed. But would such a consensus be forthcoming for a goal to reduce inequality? A certain level of inequality is not an end in itself but a means to achieve greater growth, well-being and social cohesion. Moreover, it is, and it will remain, unclear what the optimal level of inequality will be. This sort of debate—about the optimal Gini coefficient, for example—has the potential to derail progress on a post-2015 development agenda.

It is comparatively easy and desirable—and, as the MDGs showed, possible—to forge a global consensus on reducing deprivation wherever it occurs. However, distributional questions are much more issues where we will ultimately have to defer to the local processes in each country to define what type of inequality is intolerable, what can and should be done about it, and how to do that. Is it feasible or even desirable for the international community to prescribe a goal for each country? Surely each country has to make its own choices.

In short, it is clear that tackling inequality will have to be an important part of any agenda to eliminate extreme deprivations across the globe. However, that is not a justification for formulating a contentious specific goal as part of the post-2015 development agenda. As the Secretary of State for International Development said recently,

“we know promises and words will mean nothing, unless they are backed up by strong monitoring and accountability mechanisms”.

The outcome of each and every goal should be clearly measurable and in the absence of sufficient data, this will be hard to achieve with a stand-alone goal on inequality.

The report of the high-level panel states that no target should be considered “achieved” unless it is achieved for everyone, whatever their gender, income or background. How could this be properly measured and how can problem areas be identified unless the type of data available is improved dramatically? DfID’s development tracker website that tracks British development money as it is spent is a step in the right direction. It is a good example of a project that will allow us to see where equality is being improved and to use a variety of measurements rather than a bog-standard, “one rule for everyone” method.

I turn briefly to a gender equality goal. This must be a zero-sum game. Surely development is sustainable only if both halves of the world’s population are engaged in this agenda? Women are consistently disadvantaged across the developing world, without exception. All the evidence shows that countries thrive when women and girls are educated, empowered and healthy. Women have the power to transform societies, but we must ensure that they have the tools to make the changes that are so necessary.

As we have said many times in this Chamber, DfID’s record on assisting women around the world has been exceptionally good. As a result of the department’s focus on the women and girls, more than 14 million women have gained access to financial services, almost 3 million girls are in primary education and more than 4 million women are using modern methods of family planning. I am sure that we are going to hear more about that from the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge. The value of these achievements should not be underestimated. The participation of women in their communities and wider society is invaluable. Government agendas which fail to address the representation of women may lead to free and fair elections initially, but a male-dominated parliament will never fully be able to tap into and harness the potential and capacity of its entire population —and here, my Lords, we might look at ourselves again.

Yet, history has proven that when times are difficult, women are often the first to be set aside or climbed over. It is well known that women are consistently disproportionately affected by crises. Only by allowing them fully to engage with strong governance structures and giving them the tools to empower themselves can we ensure that they are protected in the future.

When the going gets complex it helps to reach for a simple guiding principle. Noble Lords may remember this quotation from Mahatma Gandhi:

“Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen”—

he wrote shortly before his death—

“and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him”.

As a guide to international co-operation on development, that is tough to beat.

The high-level panel recognised that inequality holds back human development around the world, and the report made a powerful case for a focus on the poorest and most marginalised. It is our responsibility—and debates like this help—to ensure that political momentum behind the development of a bold post-2015 framework does not fade. While the agenda is undoubtedly an opportunity to build on the achievements of the millennium development goals, we must bear in mind that there is a risk that, in our efforts to leave no one behind, we end up splitting our focus and ultimately achieving little.