Jeffrey Sachs charts the way forward for MDGs ahead of UN summit

Professor Jeffrey Sachs has outlined eight “major gaps” which need to be overcome if the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are to be achieved.

These unmet objectives are in smallholder agriculture, education, water and sanitation, health, climate financing, empowering girls and women, infrastructure, and strategies and goals at the local level.

His comments come ahead of the MDG summit, taking place in New York next month.

“The MDG Summit this year gives us the opportunity to scale up the best thinking and experience,” the world-renowned economist recently wrote in The Commonwealth Ministers Reference Book 2010. “The world has the crucial opportunity to innovate, by creating new institutions and new ways of doing things, in both the public and private spheres.”

Plans, partnerships and financing

Professor Sachs called on world leaders to arrive at this Summit “with the agreed plans, partnerships, and financing to accelerate our progress.”

He stressed the need to commit “as President Obama bid us to do this year at the UN General Assembly, to look beyond success of the MDGs to the end of extreme poverty in our time."

“The MDGs are more than technical targets,” wrote Professor Sachs. “They hold the world’s hopes and dreams for a global end of extreme poverty, hunger and disease... Working together, we can help the world to fulfil its profoundest aspirations for shared peace and prosperity.”

In his article Professor Sachs praised the practical successes of global funds such as the World Food Programme and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. Such funds, he argues, tend to combine several core strengths, including strong audits, low overhead and strong management, and technical reviews and expertise.

Funding mechanism

But despite the breakthroughs that have been achieved all over the globe, Professor Sachs, who is Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, wrote: “Unfortunately, for several MDGs, we know what works but we don’t yet have a funding mechanism to connect the proven interventions, the necessary financing, and the strong management needed for implementation.”

He goes on to touch on eight key areas, which need to be addressed. These are:

- Smallholder Agriculture. The new Global Agriculture and Food Security Plan, according to Professor Sachs, is still undercapitalised. He wrote there is a need to continue to mobilise the US$22 billion over three years, promised for smallholder farming at the 2009 G8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy.

- Education. A new Global Fund for Education would help upgrade and capitalise the current Fast Track Initiative on Education for All funding mechanism, he argued, adding: “A major priority should include helping girls to continue from primary to secondary school.”

- There is a need for an overarching multilateral funding mechanism for water and sanitation, Professor Sachs observed.

- Health. Many governments, the economist wrote, “have rightly called for new health systems financing. The best approach would be to merge the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation and the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria into a new single Global Health Fund with added responsibilities for health systems.”

- Climate financing. A new Global Climate Fund, “would ensure systematic international financing for climate change adaptation and mitigation,” he noted.

- Another unmet objective, he stated, is “support for empowering girls and women, through legal changes and through practical investments in micro-finance, smallholder farming (where most of the farmers are women), and other means to empower poor women in poor communities.”

- There is no consistent framework for truly large-scale and sustainable infrastructure in low-income countries, the economist observed, adding that “the World Bank and the regional development banks should create a new and expanded platform for financing sustainable infrastructure”.

- The final unmet need noted by Professor Sachs is “to help countries integrate the various strategies and goals at the local level, by creating networks of MDG teams in villages and districts throughout their countries.”