Millennium Development Goals

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Lords Chamber

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[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

That this House takes note of progress towards the successor framework to the Millennium Development Goals.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

My Lords, I was delighted when I learnt that I had been successful in the ballot for today’s debate. It is a pleasure to see that my noble friend Lord Ahmad will respond for the Government today, and I am sure he will continue his excellent start on the Front Bench with his new portfolio. I tabled this Motion after receiving in March and April of this year two very disappointing answers to my Written Questions to DfID on our Government’s plans for engagement with the public, the private sector and here in Parliament on the shape and elements of the successor framework for the millennium development goals. The ministerial replies I received indicated that there were no plans to provide either House with an opportunity to debate this critical issue. Surely, on something as important as the millennium development goals, where the Prime Minister has a unique contribution to make on our behalf as co-chairman of the UN High Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, and with Britain having the presidency of the G8 next year, the Government should not have had to be dragged to the Dispatch Box through a balloted debate. Parliamentary time should have been made available. The large number of noble Lords who are to follow my own remarks today show the necessity for the Government to do so. I hope that the Minister will reassure me that this will be the case.

I believe that the post-2015 goals require a redefinition of “development”. Development is about more than simply reducing poverty. At its centrepiece is the fight against corruption, the support of political and civil liberties, especially but not only for women, and access to public health for all—health that enfolds all diseases. The UK’s leadership on development should seek to strengthen the inclusion of values that we strongly support, such as the fundamental freedoms, rule of law and free market, and it must include a clear analysis of the distinctive nature of fragile and conflict-affected states. Unique targets for and within such affected populations are required in any post-2015 framework.

In the run up to 2015, we can rightly celebrate a number of successes brought about by the millennium development goals. They have taken development to the top of the global agenda. The target for halving the population of the world whose income is less than $1.25 a day has been achieved—a core goal in the overall UN strategy of poverty reduction in every country. The millennium development goals are also simple and easy to understand, communicate in every language and promote worldwide. However, these tangible successes must not divert us from the harder tasks ahead. Millennium development goal failings include the vast disparity between countries and the different goals in achieving the targets set. There is a growing cluster of countries that are being left behind. The millennium development goals were set by donors with little if any local involvement. This time round we must enshrine goals that respond to the demands, and meet the concerns, of the people we seek to support. What do these populations require? Overwhelmingly, they seek the fundamental freedoms: democracy, the rule of law, the development of the private sector, an effective fight against corruption and to lead their lives in an environment of peace and stability. In this light, I suggest that the narrow prism of development—as defined by the MDGs—is less than adequate for the tasks in hand.

This may be why a lopsided focus on certain development issues has emerged from the implementation of the MDGs so far. For example, the great expansion of global health institutions, such as the Gates Foundation, the GAVI Alliance—formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation—and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has been highly valuable, helping countless millions in extreme need to achieve freedom from pain and suffering. However, the near-messianic focus of these new and powerfully funded global health institutions on single diseases or single health tools—such as immunisation—has pushed aside the World Health Organisation’s topmost priority of access to affordable public health provision, both preventive and curative, for all humanity.

These fast-forwarding, vertical health interventions have not only drained funding from the World Health Organisation’s Health For All campaign, but it has also weakened and hollowed out local capacity to plan, administer and deliver public health on a continuing and sustainable base to local populations. This core weakness of the MDGs affects the global topmost priority of health. Primary health should become as strong a goal as primary education. Nor do the MDGs’ overall statistical analysis on health, as understood through DfID’s expenditure, highlight the health needs of acutely underserved populations in continuing complex emergencies, who are perhaps the neediest of all. The new framework for the MDGs should address these issues rigorously.

I turn to the millennium development goal for primary education. The Government have mentioned in the other place that the MDGs’ focus on quantitative results has skewed incentives, such as measuring school attendance rates rather than the quality of education actually received by those who attend school. Interestingly, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact has criticised DfID for that in two recent reports on its educational programmes in Rwanda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Nigeria.

I see four major gaps in the MDGs that need to be resolved in any successor framework: the fundamental freedoms, development of democracy, rule of law, development of the private sector and fight against corruption. I turn first to the fundamental freedoms and development of democracy. Our long-term aim in providing development assistance is to support the advance of a prosperous, well governed, democratic and stable polity that includes all its citizens equally in development. If that is the case, development cannot only be about poverty reduction. The problem is that the MDGs define development need through a poverty reduction lens, excluding such factors as human rights and corruption. In UK thinking, such neglect is accentuated by the lack of political economy analysis in our development policy, and because the FCO leads on human rights policy but not on all the related issues. This has resulted in a DfID development policy led by the MDGs that does not require the acquisition of a political understanding of the contexts in which it works. The lack of human rights in the MDG agenda needs to be rectified. Other national development agencies, such as Germany’s, have recognised the clear synergies between development and human rights, and development and democracy promotion. We are yet to set out a similar approach in the UK, leading to obvious concerns about their place in any post-2015 development framework. Will the Minister indicate in what way the Government intend to ensure that human rights will be central to any post-2015 framework?

A focus on the fundamental freedoms and the development of democracy highlights a more nuanced perspective of development need. Until now, the MDG agenda has focused largely on sub-Saharan Africa while neglecting areas such as the Middle East and North Africa. This is surprising, since the Middle East and North Africa suffers from structural violence, acute political repression and a severe lack of civil liberties, making it profoundly poor in terms of rights. The MDGs’ lack of focus on MENA arises from their privileging of material poverty over social and political change. Furthermore, despite the G8’s Deauville declaration in May 2011 that the Arab spring’s political movements,

“are historic and have the potential to open the door to the kind of transformation that occurred in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall”,

such rhetoric has not been fulfilled with the action and funding appropriate to the scale of transformation identified. Is it surprising that such glowing forecasts have not come to pass and show scant signs of doing so?

In the UK, DfID and the FCO have agreed to work together on a £110 million Arab partnership initiative from 2011-12 to 2014-15. In effect, we are providing across MENA, over a period of four years, a level of funding that is about one-third of what Ethiopia received in 2011-12, even though this funding is for a political and social transformation that we believe is on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Frankly, that is nonsensical and underlines the lack of consideration that the MDGs provide toward human rights, political and civil liberties, and confronting deep-seated political, social and economic forces that support corrupt, deeply unequal and repressive states. A focus on poverty based only on income and on delivery of social services enables the sidestepping of such fundamentally challenging issues at the expense of the people who experience them.

I turn to the rule of law, particularly in fragile and conflict-affected states. The increasing stress on the need for poverty reduction on security grounds has been a pillar of the work of DfID and of many other aid agencies since 9/11. This rests to a significant extent on the work of Paul Collier, who has argued that:

“War retards development, but conversely, development retards war”.

This belief leads directly to DfID’s identification of 21 out of 28 priority countries as fragile and conflict-affected. DfID says this is to capture the multidimensional nature of fragility. I am not denying that it is multidimensional, but I believe that the concept is being stretched for the purpose of justifying poverty reduction on security grounds. This surely provides an exceptionally weak foundation, as the major body of evidence from the field shows that it is misleading to argue conflict is development in reverse. Perhaps surprisingly, human conflict has often been the engine of development and not the obverse. Nor does it fully capture the range of factors and dynamics driving poverty and insecurity, which I would identify as corruption, heavy discrimination against different faiths, the enforced lack of freedom of association, and the lack of employment and commercial opportunities to generate entrepreneurship and private sector growth, and other matters. Surely we can all agree that these fragile and conflict-afflicted states are in a special category of concern, and that each population requires tailored and not template solutions. In his reply, can the Minister identify how the Government will incorporate conflict and security, particularly human and personal security, into the post-2015 framework?

On the development of the private sector, it is almost impossible without huge oil reserves to become a middle-income country without an industrial or manufacturing sector, particularly as this is where jobs and futures are created. Yet the MDGs do not even mention the private sector and most development work, ours included, focuses on small-scale initiatives, which do not add up to a growth strategy. I would very much welcome the Minister indicating whether the Government are working to include in the post-2015 framework words such as “industrialise” or “exports”, instead of what the Prime Minister highlighted in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, as the way to unleash the dynamism of developing economies. He said that it was,

“enabling farmers to access price information by mobile phone”.

While that is undoubtedly helpful, it is not a growth strategy that will lead to full-scale and long-term development. Can the Minister indicate whether the Government are considering how to integrate major trade preferences for developing economies into the post-2015 framework? Are they considering how to facilitate, rather than impede, migration, which has been shown to have positive development implications? After all, ODA is dwarfed every year by foreign direct investment and remittances. The post-2015 framework must harness and work with these financial flows.

On the fight against corruption, last year’s World Development Report made it clear that institutional legitimacy is the key to stability, while corruption has the doubly pernicious impacts of fuelling grievances and undermining the effectiveness of national institutions. Without comprehensive anti-corruption reforms, neither the long-term nor the immediate goals of development will be met. In his op-ed, the Prime Minister highlighted this point by mentioning corrupt elites and multi-national companies’ transparency but without putting any meat on the bones of how he intends to frame a post-2015 goal against such elites. Can the Minister suggest how the Government propose to develop a serious fight against corruption at all levels within the new MDG framework?

Finally, the four core pillars that I have identified require a broadly conceived post-2015 framework, where development does not solely mean poverty reduction but a redefined development of prosperity and freedom. I have raised many issues that have traditionally not spanned the majority of our development work on the ground. These involve the Foreign Office, UKTI and the British Council, among many more. It is essential that once the Government have developed our position towards the post-2015 framework, which will utilise large sums of UK taxpayers’ money and materially affect billions of people in the decades following 2015, that both Houses have the opportunity to debate this position. I look for a commitment from the Minister on this. It also indicates that we should begin a discussion here in Parliament on how best our ministries, agencies, and government-supported organisations should be shaped and led for the grave challenges that lie ahead for the rich and poor alike. I beg to move.

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[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

My Lords, I thank the Minister very much indeed for his full and detailed response. In this nation, with our wide, rich and varied experience and tremendously diverse but inclusive population, we have the most profound interest in the life and futures of the world. I mention the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, about the legislation which is now in front of the Egyptian Parliament. We are absolutely right to be concerned. It is a clear example of why your Lordships rose in such large quantities and with such a profusion of interventions in this important debate.

I am reminded of Pliny the Elder when he made his famous remark about Africa when I say that something new is always coming out of your Lordships’ House. The noble Lord, Lord Low, remarked that disability does not appear anywhere in the MDGs. What is this all about? The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, also remarked on the absence of mental health. This is simply not good enough. As the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, said, people need sources of wealth: they have to live and survive. We think, most profoundly, that the MDGs deserve a full-scale investigation in terms of the future post-2015 and we thank the Minister very much indeed for his commitment.

The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bates—that we should set up an ad hoc committee—might be a way forward and begin, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, by inviting the Government to contribute at least a Green Paper and, perhaps, a white one. Ministers know that this is an important topic and that this House, particularly, wishes to be heavily involved.

Motion agreed.