Fifteen years after the United Nations Millennium Declaration that committed an unprecedented number of nations to some select, time-bound development targets, the world is welcoming a new universal set of goals, targets and indicators designed, substantially, to build on the success of their predecessors. Tagged, Sustainable Development Goals, the UN’s new initiatives aim to complement as well as improve on what were achieved in the Millennium Development Goals that are approaching their terminal stages this year.
As was the case with the MDGs, the gathering of world leaders at the UN headquarters in New York was moved by the huge disparities in poverty and other human development indices into setting a fresh set of 17 goals, nine more than the MDGs. While the MDGs centred mainly on eradication of extreme poverty, ensuring education, gender equality and women empowerment, infant and maternal mortality, health and environmental sustainability, among others, the SDGs will still focus on practically all of them and more.
The SDGs will pay attention to climate change, promote inclusiveness, narrow infrastructure gaps between the rich and poor nations and promote human rights, among other goals. In general, the new goals, expected to transform the world by 2030, differ from the MDGs only in the sense that they are broader in scope and are targeted at all countries of the world, irrespective of their developmental status, unlike the MDGs that focused on the less developed countries.
But while the SDGs will offer many countries an opportunity to consolidate the gains of the MDGs, to sub-Saharan African countries, and indeed Nigeria, this is the time for some stocktaking. What did they make out of the first opportunities that they were presented with and how can they maximise the benefits of the new goals?
An area very central to both sets of goals is poverty reduction. While it is obvious that, broadly speaking, much was achieved under the MDGs globally, the same cannot be said for the sub-Saharan African countries. Statistics from the World Bank show that, for the first time, less than 10 per cent of the world’s population will be living in poverty by the end of this year. Within the past three years, the bank says the population of those living in extreme poverty, using a new yardstick of $1.90, up from $1.25, will drop from 12.8 per cent to 9.6 per cent. While 52 per cent of developing countries lived on $1.25 per day in 1981, the figure has dropped to 15 per cent now.
Evidently, China contributed most to poverty reduction. Between 1981 and 2008, the World Bank reported that 500 million Chinese escaped from poverty, a drop from 84 per cent to 13 per cent. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world where the number of poor people increased in the last three decades. “Even though the percentage of the African population living in extreme poverty is slightly lower than in 1981, population growth means that the number of people has actually doubled. They account for more than one-third of the poor in the world, despite Africa making up just 11 per cent of the global population,” a BBC report said in March.
In Nigeria, where accurate statistics are always difficult to come by, a 2012 report quoting the National Bureau of Statistics put the population of those living in relative poverty at 112.5 million. Yemi Kale, the NBS Statistician-General, said, “In 2004, Nigeria’s relative poverty measurement stood at 54.4 per cent but increased to 69 per cent or 112.518 million in 2010.” But last year, the World Bank produced new figures on Nigeria, placing new poverty estimates between 2010/2011 and 2012/2013 at within the range of 35.2 and 33.1 per cent respectively. Whatever the figures quoted, it is obvious that Nigeria failed to meet the MDG on extreme poverty reduction, even though a letter purportedly written by the Food and Agriculture Organisation gives a contrary opinion. Even that claim was not reflected in the UNDP survey report of March 2015.
On education, Nigeria also failed woefully as evidence shows those who should be in school are not there. Despite the introduction of the Universal Basic Education scheme meant to ensure free and compulsory education for the first nine years of a child’s schooling, Nigeria still harbours about 10.5 million out-of-school children, the highest in the world. This is compounded by the problem of inadequate funding, unqualified teachers and lack of critical infrastructure for learning.
The latest World Health Organisation report released last month showed that child mortality rate fell by more than half globally between 1990 and now, though still shy of the MDG target of two-thirds by 2015. Entitled “Levels and Trends in Child Mortality Report 2015,” the report says 16,000 children still die every day. That Nigeria, as usual, fared badly on this score is accentuated by the fact that smaller countries met the target. “Despite low incomes, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania have all met the MDG target,” the report said.
It is estimated that about $3 trillion will be spent annually, starting from next year, to be able to meet the new set of goals. Much of it will come from donor agencies and development partners. Though funding will be critical in meeting the set goals, what is going to produce results, in Africa especially, is the quality of governance. African leaders must find a way to eliminate conflicts and wars, eschew corruption and promote transparency in governance.
Efforts must also be geared towards increased productivity, which will in turn create jobs, and access to basic education. In a world that is driven by knowledge, very little can be achieved without education. The growth in the economy has to shift from the type Nigeria has been bragging about in the past one decade, which however failed to impact on the lives of citizens. For Nigeria in particular, there should be significant diversification in the economy that will witness less reliance on oil. By the time some of these measures are implemented, meeting some of the goals will just come naturally.
