In every country that wants to achieve the MDGs, the starting assumption should be that they are feasible unless technically proven otherwise. In many of the poorest countries, the Goals are indeed ambitious, but in most or even all countries they can still be achieved by 2015 if there are intensive efforts by all parties—to improve governance, actively engage and empower civil society, promote entrepreneurship and the private sector, mobilize domestic resources, substantially increase aid to countries that need it to support MDG-based priority investments, and make suitable policy reforms at the global level, such as those in trade.
It is crucial that technical constraints to meeting the Goals not be confused with financial constraints. Although poverty reduction is the primary responsibility of developing countries themselves, achieving the Goals in the poorest countries—those that genuinely aspire to achieve the MDG targets—will require significant increases in official development assistance to break the poverty trap. We urge all low-income countries to increase their own resource mobilization for the Goals by devoting budget revenues to priority investments. And in countries where governance is adequate but domestic resources are not, we call on donors to follow through on their long-standing commitments to increase aid significantly. In short, we call for co-financing the scale up of MDG-based investments. The rich countries must no longer delay on their side of the bargain.
Our core operational recommendation is that each developing country with extreme poverty should adopt and implement a national development strategy ambitious enough to achieve the Goals. The country's international development partners—including bilateral donors, UN agencies, regional development banks, and the Bretton Woods institutions—should give all the support needed to implement the country's MDG-based poverty reduction strategy. In particular, official development assistance should be generous enough to fill the financing needs, assuming that governance limitations are not the binding constraint and that the recipient countries are making their own reasonable efforts at increasing domestic resource mobilization. If countries already have a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), it should be revised so that it is ambitious enough to achieve the Goals. Where the Goals are already within reach and greater progress is sought, we suggest that countries adopt an “MDG-plus” strategy, with more ambitious targets. Where countries are in conflict or emerging from conflict, we suggest that development strategies be balanced with urgent humanitarian efforts, especially for displaced populations. |
