What 5 Experts Think of the Millennium Development Goals

The United Nations just released its 2015 Millennium Development Goals report, so we thought it was a good time to share the thoughts of five experts who joined the United Nations’ Tomas Anker Christensen in discussing the MDGs—and measuring development efforts in general—at the recent Skoll World Forum. Launched by world leaders and the UN in 2000, the MDGs gave eight measurable goals to alleviate poverty and improve lives by the end of 2015.

Listen to the conversation, above, moderated by Pamela Hartigan of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepeneurship. Panelists included Michael Green of the Social Progress Imperative, Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Bunker Roy of Barefoot College, Dorothy Stoneman of YouthBuild USA, and Patrick Awuah of Ashesi University.

We know not everyone has time to watch a one-hour session, so here are some highlights from each:

• “Metrics makers are not connected to the very poor people who live on less than a dollar a day,” Roy said. “These are the people Mahatma Gandhi called the very last man and woman. With due respect, these goals are a joke, because they don’t relate to the lifestyle and reality of rural communities living around the world who are living a hand-to-mouth survival existence.”
• “Focus more money on the best targets and just spend the money there…that’s like quadrupling global aid,” Lomborg said, referring to the number of targets or goals. “If we ask governments to do fewer things that are harder to screw up, they will more likely have done a lot of good in 2030.”
• “Ultimately, this is about…holding leaders to account by citizens and making these things part of the political debate….what the MDGs did have was an underlying concept: extreme poverty,” Green said, after his earlier remarks on his Social Progress Index and examples of how it’s worked. “So whatever you spoke about related to the MDGs, everyone kind of knew what it was…It needs to be an underlying concept for these ‘people’s goals’  communicated in a simple form so that it becomes part of the political debate so a politician can say, ‘Vote for me because GDP went up and we made progress on this’ …and it’s not about 17 goals.”
• “When we began to measure, we decided to ask the nonprofits we work with, what should we measure?” Stoneman said. “So they set the objectives and we have measured them for 25 years: How many people apply? How many people come every day? We measure academic gains, academic achievement, industry-recognized credentials, completion of the total program, placement in jobs or post-secondary education or retention of jobs and post-secondary education, and recidivism for those who have had previous problems with the law…we encourage the government to hold people accountable for outcomes but when they do it too rigidly, it creates a negative effect….”
• “There is a lot of positive that came out of the MDGs around poverty, infant mortality and maternal care; that gives me hope that if goals are stated properly, we can in fact achieve them,” Awuah said.

Read more: http://archive.dev.skoll.org/2015/04/19/forum2015-a-warning-on-global-development-goals/