Authors: Kofi Annan
Another important feature of the report was its endorsement of a more advanced concept of poverty than had been represented at the highest political level up to that time. Poverty is not a monodimensional problem involving just a lack of income. Extreme poverty represents a complex, multifaceted set of phenomena involving the denial of opportunities across many areas of life, causing and reinforcing each other. Part of poverty is a lack of income, yes, but so too is a lack of education, health care, nutrition, access to safe drinking water, the subjugation of women, and environmental degradation. An integral part of the existence of extreme poverty is also the lack of outside assistance for tackling it.
We the Peoples
and the MDGs sought to capture all these.
In the reality of international politics, however, because we had a document that called for major commitments by governments, this made it less likely they would ever agree to it. But there were pressures we were able to make work in our favor. We were reaping the results of our engagement with international civil society. The NGO Oxfam, for example, through its support for the “Make Poverty History” campaign, collected 2 million signatures, which they presented to me in New York during the Millennium Summit. Alongside the Millennium Assembly of UN member states, we held a number of concurrent assemblies: a Peoples' Assembly, in the form of an assembly of international NGOs; a forum of the world's religious leaders; and another for representatives of the various parliaments (as opposed to governments) from around the world. Along with the world's press, these formed a moral forum, to lobby and pressure the governments sitting nearby, which was particularly significant given that many of these organizations had supporters that reached back into the countries of the governments in attendance.
The weight of popular expectation also helped us. The level of adulation and attention accompanying the buildup to the millennium around the world was such that, with a Millennium Summit involving the greatest collection of world leaders in history (it would host 147 in total), the event could only attract intense international scrutiny. The result was a palpable fear among member states that a special Millennium Summit might cause real damage to their credibility if little was achieved. This concern was motivated by the lesson of the fiftieth UN anniversary assembly in 1995. There all the major issues of the world had been discussed but without any agreement to do anything about them, and presidents and prime ministers returned from its pomp and ceremony under a cloud.
But because of how we had fashioned and produced
We the Peoples,
if
the member states wanted an agreement, they were going to have to work with the deal on poverty that we had set up for them. There was no other deal available. Combined with the simplicity of the goals set out in the reportâon rights to life, health, basic education, sanitation, and food, which no one in their right mind could deny when put to themâthis made it even more difficult for the member states to reject our proposals.
There was one further measure we applied to stack the deck in our favor. To be a head of government is to be trapped in the paraphernalia and pressures of office. It is to be in the midst of countless aides and advisors, all the while worrying about the compromises that must be made to appease various domestic constituencies. Many times had we seen this interfere and obliterate agreements based around otherwise rational collective interest. But when you got them on their own, I always found even the most intransigent leaders would typically prove far more reasonable and responsive. At the Millennium Summit we set up three roundtable discussion sessions with the leaders to examine the crucial features of
We the Peoples
. But we also set the requirement that only the heads of state and government would be in attendance. There would be no aides or advisors in the rooms with them. This stripped them of their domestic political padding and the distractions such staff bring to negotiations. The civil servants, advisors, and presidential handlers hated this, but, very tellingly, the leaders loved it.
This tight combination of factors meant that we got the global deal we were seeking. Almost all the features of
We the Peoples
were then endorsed in the Millennium Declaration. The declaration was signed by every one of the UN's 189 member states, with twenty-three other international organizations committing to its targets. Unlike previous great summits, this was not an agreement to certify the balance of power, legitimize conquest, or bolster a concept of the inviolable right of states to run themselves however they wished. This was a pledge by all states to fight the major manifestations of extreme poverty and deprivation the world over. Rather than being explicitly for the power and protection of states, this agreement redirected the principles of responsibility and accountability of all governments toward alleviating and ending the suffering of the world's most downtrodden.
From the Millennium Declaration we would develop the eight Millennium Development Goals. These were finalized in the summer of 2001 after a process of consultation and negotiation led by John Ruggie and Michael Doyle and overseen by my able deputy, Louise Frechette, whose responsibilities included the UN's economic and management agendas. Mark Malloch Brown, the energetic and reform-minded head of UNDP, was then tasked with the ambitious job of implementing and advocating the goals worldwide. In their basic form, the goals are:
It is important to note that all these goals, and their subsidiary targets and benchmarks, were expressed and signed up to in some form by major member states in the years before 2000. But these pledges always suffered from a lack of momentum, petered out, or went largely unnoticed.
One of the crucial features of the Millennium Declaration as an instrument of poverty eradication was that it was signed by all nations. It set out the responsibility of the rich nations to provide external assistance, while making that assistance contingent upon an explicit responsibility owned by the developing and poor countries. In short, it was a global deal that established a universal and fully shared duty to deliver development to the extreme poor.
But further setting apart the Declaration from previous pledges to fight poverty, the member states had signed a document binding each of them to a set of concrete, time-bound, and measurable goals. Against these, they agreed, would be a list of quantifiable targets and measures, focused on a deadline of 2015. By signing the Millennium Declaration, therefore, the member states not only made a rhetorical commitment to fight poverty but permitted the birth of a system by which every member state could be held publicly accountable on the world stage. Lending this further power was the simplicity of the goals. Unlike the vast majority of UN agreements and communiqués, these goals could be understood by anyone, from the senior politician in the capital city of the wealthiest nation to the man or woman on the street of the poorest shantytownâand they articulated human needs that were so basic and obvious they were undeniable to anyone who considered them.
Between this universal simplicity and the commitment to a quantifiable set of targets, the member states thus bound themselves within the shackles of an incredibly powerful global idea. Many of them did so unwittingly, I suspect, not realizing the strength of what they had brought to life and expecting it to suffer the same quick death that had overtaken so many other UN declarations. If so, they were to be surprised by what was to come. The MDGs soon became the overarching framework for the entire international development agenda. A decade later, at the September 2010 UN summit, the MDGs would still be at the pinnacle of global affairs, with every development organization dedicated to them, every government engaged, and countless other partners and businesses geared toward their delivery in every part of the planet.
To anyone who reflects back on the agreement, there is no denying its significance. With all the partners that had morally and formally bought into the project alongside the member states, with the common interest of so many otherwise diverse communities around the world, this was more than just a breakthrough UN declaration: it bore the hallmarks of a global social movement.
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ow do you respond to those who say the poor will always be with us?” I asked. I had turned the conversation suddenly. It was July 2, 2005, and I was calling the head of the Anglican Church, the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, to link up before the looming Gleneagles G8 summit. But my real motivation was to ask for spiritual guidance. Once again I had been presented with the view that the campaign to make poverty history was impossibleâeven ordained by the Bible to fail. The key quotation was in Deuteronomy 15:11: “There will always be poor people in the land.”
“To some extent this is based in thinking that the poor are victims of human sin: that there will always be poor people, because there will always be sinners,” he replied.
“We shouldn't be complacent,” I responded, trying to find a way out of an excuse for inaction.
The archbishop stressed his agreement: “The idea of shared accountability and social responsibility is explained in the Old Testament, and can be applied to the issue of helping the poor. Deuteronomy 15:4: âThere should be no poor person among you.' This is why Deuteronomy 15:11 should be interpreted as instruction that the poor are part of society and should not be ignored, not that we cannot strive to end their plight.” I thanked him for this piece of armory that I had never imagined I would need.
The MDGsâputting people irrevocably at the center of developmentâcreated an unprecedented enthusiasm, momentum, and collaboration on a worldwide scale. But it did not end our struggle with the old problems of international development, some even as ancient as interpretations of the Bible. It was a reminder that in international development there is and will always remain the danger of the world's slipping back into the unenlightened and narrow-minded views of the past.
Following the Millennium Summit, we sensed the risk that the pledge might fall away if we did not sustain the momentum. Our first step was to firm up the agreement and to formalize its aims. Set against the targets of “We the Peoples” and the eight subsequent MDGs were eighteen subsidiary targets and attached to them were forty-eight further individual metrics for assessing progress toward the goals. I presented these to the member states, telling them that these would form a public “scorecard” for each country over the coming years. To give this further bite, I then invited the heads of state and government to a world summit to be held in 2005, where a global-assessment exercise would be conducted under the world's spotlight on each country's progress toward the MDGs.
But we also needed a strategy for achieving the goals, which the declaration had not provided. This required a team with the intellectual and analytical prowess to chart such a course. In February 2002, I asked Jeff Sachs to lead this endeavor, which became known as the Millennium Project. Sachs's unusual intellect and deep commitment to the cause of poverty eradication made him an ideal addition to my senior staff. It was a complex research exercise, and Sachs pulled together 250 eminent participants across the project's ten task forces, engaging all of the UN system and representatives of all the major UN agencies, while also linking up with on-the-ground efforts across developing countries.
What the Millennium Project demonstrated was that the MDGs were attainable. We just needed the right level of commitment, effort, and, most of all, external assistance. While we had targets and a growing set of plans to make the MDGs a reality, crucial to any success was the ingredient captured in the eighth goal: a global partnership.
This partnership is vital because of the worst feature of extreme poverty: alone, the poor are in too dire a position to help themselves. As Jeff Sachs has explained on many occasions, the basic requirement for ending extreme poverty is to enable the poorest to step onto the ladder of development, which the millions upon millions of the poorest in the world are unable to do alone because of the “poverty trap.” This is when communities become caught in a vicious cycle that denies them the minimum level and forms of capital necessary to initiate a process of development.
For any hope of achieving some form of economic development, communities need a combination of several different types of capital, including human, physical, and natural capital. The essential components of these take many forms: healthy individuals free from malnutrition with the skills to productively engage in the economy; asserting women's rights to determine their own reproductive destiny; facilities for commercial activity, such as transport for agriculture or facilities and machinery for other sectors; infrastructure, including transport networks, power supplies, and sanitation and communication systems; healthy soils and ecosystems that sustain human communities; public institutional capacity, in the form of commercial law, judicial and security services, underpinning peaceful societies of commerce and labor; and finally, knowledge, in the form of scientific expertise and skills required to raise productivity and boost other areas of capital. There is also an important role for social capitalâthe collective value of cohesive community relationshipsâwhich, through its networks of trust, enables the sharing of resources between individuals, boosting the power of other forms of capital and also enabling households to survive in times of deepest hardship.
For a community to enjoy any prospects for economic development there has to be a cycle of accumulation of such forms of capital. This requires that the income of each household be of a sufficient size to leave enough left over for both household savings and contributions to the public budget through taxation. These then enable investment in human, physical, and natural capital that in turn sustain business and economic development. What then emerges is a virtuous cycle of capital accumulation, allowing economic growth, in turn strengthening opportunities for increases in household income, and so on.