Why the Goals are important

The key to achieving the Goals in low-income countries is to ensure that each person has the essential means to a productive life. In today's global economy, these means include adequate human capital, access to essential infrastructure, and core political, social, and economic rights (box 3).

In the process of economic growth, the Millennium Development Goals play two roles. First, the Goals are “ends in themselves,” in that reduced hunger, improved health and education, and access to safe water and sanitation are direct goals of society. Second, the Goals are also inputs to economic growth and further development. When suitably empowered with human capital, infrastructure, and core human rights in a market-based economy, women and men can secure productive and decent employment through personal initiative. When infrastructure, health, and education are widely available, poor countries can join the global division of labor in ways that promote economic growth, raise living standards, and increase technological sophistication.

The key elements of adequate human capital include:

• Basic nutrition.
• A health system that enables people to live a long and healthy life.
• Sexual and reproductive health.
• Literacy, numeracy, and marketable skills for twenty-first century jobs.
• Technical and entrepreneurial skills to adopt existing but underused technologies and scientific expertise to advance new knowledge.

The essential infrastructure services include:

• Safe drinking water and basic sanitation.
• A sustainably managed and conserved natural environment.
• Farm inputs, including soil nutrients, reliable water for agriculture, and improved seed varieties, plus vaccines, veterinary pharmaceuticals, and feed and fodder for livestock.
• Energy, including electricity and safe cooking fuels.
• Paved roads and transport services that are safe and reliable, including nonmotorized options.
• Modern information and communications technology.

The core political, social, and economic rights include:

• Equal rights, including reproductive rights, for women and girls.
• Freedom from violence, especially for girls and women.
• A political voice for every citizen, often through civil society organizations.
• Equal access to public services.
• Security of tenure and property rights for shelter, businesses, and other assets.

But when individuals and whole economies lack even the most basic infrastructure, health services, and education, market forces alone can accomplish little. Households and whole economies remain trapped in poverty, and fail to reap the benefits of globalization. Without basic infrastructure and human capital, countries are condemned to export a narrow range of low-margin primary commodities based on natural (physical) endowments, rather than a -diversified set of exports based on technology, skills, and capital investments. In such circumstances, globalization can have significant adverse effects—including brain drain, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, capital flight, and terms-of-trade declines—rather than bring benefits through increased foreign direct investment inflows and technological advances.

Consider a typical village of subsistence farm households in a poor country, such as Afghanistan, Bhutan, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, or Papua New Guinea. The village lacks access to a paved road and motor transport. Also lacking electricity, its energy needs are met by extracting wood from the diminished secondary forests and woodlands. Drinking water is unsafe and latrines regularly serve as a reservoir of infection through contamination of food and the local water supply. The children are sick from diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria.

In an African village, adults are dying of AIDS and tuberculosis, without hope of treatment. Farmers toil but do not even produce enough food to feed their families. The soils were long ago depleted of nutrients, especially nitrogen. The rains fail, and there is no backup irrigation.

In these village settings, women carry a triple burden, caring for children, the elderly, and the sick, spending long hours to gather water and fuelwood, to process and produce food, and working on farms or in family enterprises for little or no income. Impoverished families have more children than they desire because of poor access to education, contraception, decent employment opportunities, and sexual and reproductive health information and services. Education seems at best a luxury to most citizens. And since there is no emergency obstetric care, mothers die in childbirth at a hundred or more times the rate in the rich world.

Market forces alone will not rescue the village. Indeed, markets tend to bypass villages with little if any monetary income, and no ready means to earn it, given the low productivity and poor connections with the regional and world economy. The village barely lives off its own food production. Without money it cannot attract doctors, teachers, or transport firms. Without electricity or access to modern fuels it cannot run food processing equipment, irrigation pumps, computers, or electric tools for carpentry or apparel. Villagers do not have enough income to save. And since infrastructure and a skilled workforce are lacking, private investors do not come. Young men and women, particularly the literate, leave the village for cities—and the best educated leave the country.

The same downward spiral applies to many urban areas. On arrival, migrants from rural areas might find employment, though informal and insecure, and they are faced with inaccessible and unaffordable housing. They take refuge in ill-serviced and overcrowded informal settlements. Many of the largest urban agglomerations in the low-income world are like extended villages, and rapidly growing cities in middle-income countries are often very poorly planned, with large areas bereft of functioning infrastructure, employment, and environmental management.

A generation or more of migrants from the countryside, combined with rapid natural population growth, results in a sprawl of densely settled humanity lacking the basics of healthcare, education, electricity, water supply, sanitation, solid waste disposal, and access to transport. People living in slums are largely excluded from enjoying their political, social, and economic rights. Some slums are so densely populated that it is not even possible to drive an ambulance into them. Diseases like tuberculosis spread like wildfire. HIV/AIDS is often rampant.

Yet practical steps can be taken to turn the tide. Both villages and cities can become part of global economic growth if they are empowered with the infrastructure and human capital to do so. If every village has a road, access to transport, a clinic, electricity, safe drinking water, education, and other essential inputs, the villagers in very poor countries will show the same determination and entrepreneurial zeal of people all over the world. If every city has a reliable electricity grid, competitive telecommunications, access to transport, accessible and affordable housing for the poor, a water and sanitation system, and access to global markets through modern ports or roads, jobs and foreign investment will flow in—rather than educated workers flowing out.

Investing in core infrastructure, human capital, and good governance therefore accomplishes several things:

• It converts subsistence farming to market-oriented farming.
• It establishes the basis for private sector–led diversified exports and economic growth.
• It enables a country to join the global division of labor in a productive way.
• It sets the stage for technological advance and eventually for an -innovation-based economy.

Achieving the Goals is largely about making core investments in infrastructure and human capital that enable poor people to join the global economy, while empowering the poor with economic, political, and social rights that will enable them to make full use of infrastructure and human capital, wherever they choose to live.