Michael Harding is currently working on drawing together projects with stable business models to support Millennium Promise, the independent non government organisation created to support the Millennium Goals of the United Nations. The Millennium Promise has been established as a vehicle of delivery for the UN Millennium Goals for the World, which Kofi Annan asked the leading economist, Jeff Sachs, to operate for the UN. Dr McArthur is now CEO and Executive Director of Millennium Promise, and is leading this global initiative, soon to be launched in North America. John McArthur describes the Millennium Promise as ” … an alliance-focused undertaking to launch leadership-type global initiatives that bridge business, science, government, and non-profit worlds, with a focus on ending extreme poverty.”
As a further description of the Millennium Promise, and to learn of Dr McArthur’s clear statement about the state of the world’s support as well as of areas where support could be better, he wrote the following article for the Ottawa Citizen in November 2009.
” Remember our promises
In the past decade there have been some great gains in the developing world. But the coming year will be critical to meeting rich countries’ obligations
By John W. McArthur, Citizen SpecialNovember 27, 2009 8:58 AM
We are in the final days of a decade that has seen remarkable progress in global development. Amidst enormous strains, the international community has made huge strides in tackling multiple affronts to the human condition. Over the next 12 months, the world will establish new norms and systems that should set the course for a generation. In the middle of it all, Canada is chairing some of the most pivotal global meetings. The Canadian government and broader citizenry have a special responsibility to lead.
Much of the decade’s progress has been spurred by the Millennium Development Goals, the holistic set of time-bound targets adopted in 2000 for tackling dollar-a-day extreme poverty in its many forms by 2015. By identifying a clear and coherent set of performance metrics, these goals have become the centerpiece of co-operation bridging the richest and the poorest countries.
The successes are well established, even if poorly conveyed among general publics and suppressed by provocative naysayers that periodically bounce across the media.
Consider the successes in Africa alone. More than 35 million additional children are in primary school. Innovative aid delivery mechanisms have slashed measles deaths 90 per cent and delivered life-saving AIDS treatment to nearly three million people. After generations of neglect, nearly 200 million modern anti-malaria bednets have been distributed within just a few years. Countries like Ethiopia and Mozambique have seen decisive drops in child mortality. Malawi has doubled its food production alongside breathtaking economic growth rates, sustained even in 2008 when most every other economy was in a tailspin.
But the successes are incomplete and the coming year will be critical for the fate of the goals. Less than half the people who need AIDS treatment are so far receiving it. Practical incentives like school meals are needed to ensure basic education for all children, especially girls. The new international fund for smallholder agriculture was announced to great fanfare at this year’s G8 summit in Italy, but has yet to get off the ground. Issues like maternal health, water management and sanitation all remain orphaned by a global system not yet equipped to tackle them. All progress is at risk amidst precarious climate shifts.
In September 2010, leaders from all UN member states will convene at a summit in New York for the last major check-in on progress, the final chance for major course corrections over the home stretch to 2015. In his recent address to the UN General Assembly, U.S. President Barack Obama re-committed the United States to the achievement of the Goals, and to the adoption of a global action plan at next year’s summit. Such a practical focus on timetables and results is precisely the order of the day.
The most important precursor to the September UN event will occur in June, when Canada will host a subset of the world’s richest and most powerful countries for the twin G8 and G20 summits. While the agenda will undoubtedly prioritize the macroeconomic challenges facing advanced and emerging markets around the world, the G8 will also need to confront one significant and uncomfortable topic. Specifically, the G8 as a group has now locked in a spectacular self-governance failure by neglecting to deliver on its high-profile 2005 promise to double aid to Africa by 2010.
Of the seven countries that made commitments in 2005, France, Germany and Italy accounted for the bulk of the aggregate pledge, but they have failed to keep their word. The strain was evident well before the economic crisis, which has only added to the pressures against follow-through. Canada, Japan and the United States made modest pledges and have generally complied. Britain is the only country to have made a quantitatively significant pledge and also to stay the course.
The 2010 gap between promises and reality now stands at around $20 billion annually — small change among multi-trillion-dollar rich-country bailouts, but unconscionable when measured in terms of bednets, medicines, nurses, roads, fertilizer and other life-changing interventions that will not be delivered as a result.
The strain is particularly profound in light of the fact that the crisis caused by some of the world’s richest and most powerful people has had the worst consequences at the furthest margins of the global economy, pushing roughly 100 million people back below the dollar-a-day line of extreme poverty and hunger.
Institutionally, the multi-billion-dollar budget gaps are faced in places like the World Food Program, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. The heroic leaders of each of these initiatives are left pleading for attention to explain their success stories, to convey the need for maintaining programmatic momentum, and to ensure multi-year budgets can be set to tackle problems in a minimally rigorous and evidence-based manner.
In 2010, the global development conversation must focus on implementing and scaling these and other practical mechanisms that have produced so much success and momentum over the past decade. The key questions are how these international delivery mechanisms will be financed, on what timetable, and against what deliverables for the next five years.
These topics are integral to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. At a time when high-profile rich-country commitments have become harder to trust, they are also fundamental to sustaining the integrity of a goal-based international system. The deepest question underpinning the global policy debates is which commitments still count. As the convener of the June 2010 summits, Canada has the world’s central role in ensuring accountability on all sides, and not letting anyone wiggle away from greater global responsibilities.
But the fate of a planet cannot merely wait on government leaders and their summits.
One of the great lessons of the past decade is the critical role that individuals, companies and organizations can play in moving global partnership forward. Spurred by individuals expanding their philanthropy, companies making their technologies available at a discount, and advocates leading the charge in public education, countless breakthroughs have occurred when governments have followed rather than led.
It is thus a matter both for Ottawa’s elite and for all Canadians to decide how the country will face a defining moment of global responsibility in the year ahead. ”
John W. McArthur is CEO and executive director of Millennium Promise.
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