Answering the Skeptics: Achieving gender equality and the Millennium Development Goals
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Dialogue
Answering the Skeptics: Achieving gender equality and the Millennium Development Goals1
CAREN GROWN
ABSTRACT Caren Grown responds to the tensions and different points of view in the international debate on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) brought out in Development 48.1 on the MDGs. She takes issue with the skeptical view that the MDGs are doomed to failure, and she argues they can be transformational if governments’ and civil society ensure that the seven priorities for gender equality outlined in the Task Force Three report are followed. KEYWORDS Task Force Three UN Millennium Project; distributive justice; global community; gender mainstreaming
Introduction There is significant debate within countries and the international community about the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), much of which is captured in Development Volume 48.1. Contrary to the cynicism and sense of failure expressed by authors in that volume, I want to highlight another perspective. Although I sympathize, and even agree, with some of the concerns raised by MDG-skeptics, fundamentally I believe that the MDGs present a global policy opportunity through which advocates for gender equality and pro-poor development can advance their agendas. Some have charged that the MDGs are minimalist. That is true. These eight goals represent the unfinished business of development: they are first generation issues that have not been solved. Others argue that the MDGs are doomed to failure. That will be the case if the world community does not act and if our political leaders fail to make the right choices. Indeed, if the world community takes concreted action, the MDGs could transform current poverty reduction processes into meaningful outcomes for poor men and women. The global community already has the resources, the technology and the knowledge.What it lacks and needs now is the political will to make it happen.
Resources, technology, knowledge and political will We have the resources needed for the MDGs. At the Monterrey Financing for Development Conference in 2002, world leaders pledged to make concerted efforts towards the target of 0.7 per cent of their GNP in international aid. In today’s dollars, that would amount to almost US $200 billion. The cost of supporting countries to meet the Goals Development (2005) 48(3), 82–86. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100170
Grown: Gender Equality and the MDGs would require donors to increase ODA to 0.44 per cent of GNP by 2006 (or US $135 billion) and to plan for a scale-up to 0.54 per cent by 2015 (or US $195 billion), UN 2005. This means that of the combined rich world GNP of approximately $30 trillion, only an average of $150 billion a year would be enough to get the world on track to end extreme poverty throughout the world (UN, 2005a). We have the technology ^ we have the anti-retrovirals for HIV/AIDS, we have insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria, we have a range of quality family planning methods for women who want to space or prevent child bearing. We have the knowledge. W
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