Millennium Development Goals

Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Low, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, for achieving this debate. My friend, the Archbishop of Central Africa, Albert Charma, notes:

“The success of the MDG project is best witnessed through the eyes of a woman who can finally escape an abusive relationship because through her involvement in a microfinance project she can provide for herself and her children. It can be viewed also through the eyes of an orphaned child, who does not have to go to bed hungry and who can also attend school regularly”.

Success is about individual lives being transformed. The impact of the MDGs cannot be captured by statistical trends alone; context is everything. From the perspective of the Church of England, the development goals have provided a broad narrative from which we have been able to frame development. They have animated our networks and our relationships around the Anglican Communion and, on a day-by-day basis, our diocese networks and mission agencies have used the MDGs to mobilise parishes and clergy on global issues. They have also been taken up by our schools. Those most affected and likely to affect the future are taking part in the concerns of these goals.

Further, the MDGs have become a meeting place for faith communities, both here in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, to come together to campaign for the global common good and to share best practice. This is a very positive approach. It is an educational approach that has caught the mind and the public’s imagination and we should commend it. Of course, like other speakers before me, I am very conscious of the fact that the millennium development goals, as has already been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, have not impacted as well as they might on the poorest in the world. Nevertheless, there has been an extraordinary achievement in the period of time that we have undertaken them.

We are now looking forward to the post-2015 reality. We have recognised that the MDG process has sharpened political attention and public engagement with poverty reduction efforts. That is something that many of us have longed for over many years. I am absolutely sure that the post-MDG agenda should not be defined by a group of people who regard themselves as experts or technocrats. We do not need a donor-centric model. We have to work to something that enables and empowers right across the board. I believe that the consultation process regarding the post-2015 reality needs to be generally universal in nature. We should not be limiting this to low-income countries, nor simply to sub-Saharan Africa. We need to think more broadly than that. It is important, however, to retain a target-based approach post-2015 and it is always true that when targets are inspiring, clear and measurable, we get the best results. They need to be few in number but clear.

I was very grateful for the words of the noble Lord, Lord Bates, earlier in the debate for, like him, I believe that a key element of the future must be a commitment to peacebuilding through disarmament. We have only to look at the realities of our world today to see the impact of indiscriminate arms and the continual build-up and maintenance of weapons which we no longer need for the future of humanity.

I have already referred to my belief that we need to challenge the existing donor-centric model of development. We need a new timeframe in order to accomplish the major transformations that we envisage. We need to return to the millennium declaration and see it as something that was, as it were, setting out before us a wider vision. The millennium development goals show that a set of clear and measurable targets can be a driver of transformative change. Of course, the world will not achieve all the MDGs, but they have galvanised all sorts of people around the world and all sorts of political persuasions have been empowered to think differently. A target-based approach to 2015 ought therefore to be retained and it is important to remember that targets work best, as I have said, when they are clear and ambitious but feasible and, above all, measurable.