SpeechHilary Benn, Secretary of State for International Development, University College, Oxford University'Towards 2015: Can the Millennium Development Goals Be Realised? '10 October 2006 Thanks Ngaire [Woods] and Kevin [Watkins]. I’m very pleased to speak here and on this subject – you run an excellent and well respected programme – touching many of the issues of global governance. And Kevin, I’m looking forward to the launch of the UNDP 2006 Human Development Report – it is right that it focuses on water because water is so important to poor people, and especially girls. And without action on water, the other Millennium Development Goals will not be achieved. So what is the challenge we face? Our small and fragile planet is shared by over 6 billion people – a human family that is more interdependent that at any time in its history – and a family that has, for the first time, the capacity to make sure that every one of them is lifted out of poverty. But the truth is this. Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century. Yet in poor countries, pregnancy and childbirth kill a woman every minute – so two women have died since I started speaking - they die with no trained midwife or doctor to help. A world where four million children die each year in their first month of their short life. And half of all child deaths are the result of malnutrition. Where dirty water and inadequate sanitation kill 6,000 children each and every day. And where each year, every year, malaria kills one million people, tuberculosis two million people, AIDS three million people. Every one of them a soul extinguished. 300 million people live in fragile states. In Afghanistan, one in four children die before the age of five. Life expectancy is only 44 years. In Somalia there has been no government for 15 years and 80% of children have never seen the inside of a classroom. While globally we will meet the poverty reduction millennium development goal, it’s mainly because of progress in China and India, there’s a huge challenge in Africa which saw poverty rise in the last decade. In education, we are not on course to achieve equal enrolment of girls and boys by 2015, and net enrolment worldwide may only be around 87%. And given that over 270 million children worldwide have no access to healthcare, we are not on track to meet the child mortality goal. And in water, as Kevin could tell us, we need to bring clean water to 300,000 people each day, every day for the next ten years to meet the goal. That’s like supplying water to the cities of Edinburgh, Belfast, Cardiff and Birmingham, every week, every month, every year for the next decade. In sanitation we have to double our current global effort. And all of this is taking place in a world that is rapidly changing. A generation of teenagers is entering the workforce in developing economies. By 2010, 733 million more people will be of working age, compared to 50 million in the rich world. Many of them will migrate, internally and abroad, in search of a better life. Within three decades, the urban populations of Africa, Asia and Latin America will double to nearly four billion human beings. By 2020, the majority of Asian men and women will live in towns and cities. Ten years later, the same will be true of most Africans. The economic and political landscape is changing – by the middle of this century, countries like China, Brazil and India, will play a much stronger role than they do now. Climate Change – hardest felt by those least responsible for it – developing countries – has the potential to cause untold damage and harm far beyond the reach of any aid programme. And while some countries are trading more, and are benefiting from and helping to create rising global prosperity, others are left behind, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa which saw its share of world trade decline from 6% to 2% over the past two decades. The Doha Round, which was meant to address all this, shames us all as it lies stalled while each of the big trading blocks waits for the other to move. To do the right thing. We do face huge challenges but we should take hope from the progress that is being made. In the past 40 years, life expectancy in the developing world increased by a quarter. In the past 30 years, illiteracy has fallen by half. In the past 20 years, 400 million human beings lifted out of absolute poverty. Just last month I was in Vietnam where poverty fell from three quarters in the late 1980s to under a third in 2002, with extreme poverty half of that – the fastest reduction in poverty in any country in the world. We’ve beaten smallpox, and we are nearly there with polio. And last year the world came together and agreed to do more. The Commission for Africa report, the Gleneagles G8, the Make Poverty History campaign, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, the millennium summit. And we achieved a great deal. The G8 agreed $50 billion extra in aid, with $25 billion to Africa, by 2010. And we agreed a new target of by 2010 access for all to AIDS treatment. Free basic education and health care. Better ways of dealing with conflict. We have made progress on a number of things. Take two. The debt of 20 countries has been fully cancelled, over $81 billion. This is new money available for investment in education or health or infrastructure. The International Finance Facility for Immunisation was launched to help save the lives of an additional 5 million children over the next decade, and bonds will be issued later this month. True, we have not made poverty history, but we are making progress, step by step. The challenge for all of us is to make good on our commitments. And that includes the commitment to good governance. That’s what our white paper was really about. Good governance starts and finishes with developing countries themselves. Development doesn’t happen without effective states, capable of delivering services to their citizens and helping economies to grow. States that respond to peoples’ needs and which, in turn, can be held to account. While we will continue to help build the capacity of public institutions for good governance in developing countries, we will now do more at the grassroots to reinforce the demand for good governance. We are setting up a new £100 million Governance and Transparency Fund to do this, and have launched consultation on its design. It will support civil society, a free media, parliamentarians and trade unions in improving accountability. To ensure that our aid is used to best effect, we not only evaluate its effectiveness, but will in future regularly assess the quality of governance, transparency and commitment to reducing poverty in the countries in which we work. We will publish these assessments. We all know that bad governance and corruption are international problems too. Earlier this year the Prime Minister asked me to take on the responsibility of leading the UK fight against international corruption, working with other UK ministers, and with the international community. Our new Anti-Corruption Action Plan aims to do more in four areas –
As a first step, we will create a new Overseas Corruption Unit by November this year. And it’ll be staffed by both the Metropolitan Police, and City of London Police. It will help the UK increase its capacity to investigate and prosecute those guilty of these crimes. We’ve also made progress with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Since its launch in 2002 more than twenty countries have signed up to implement the EITI. Two countries are now reporting regularly - Azerbaijan and Nigeria. A further three have produced EITI reports - Guinea, Gabon, Kyrgyzstan, and we expect four more to report by the end of 2006 - Ghana, Cameroon, Kazakhstan and Mauritania. We will continue to support EITI, politically, financially and technically, and to encourage all resource rich countries to implement the initiative. We will also sponsor a UN General Assembly Resolution to make EITI an international standard of good management. And we hope other countries will support us in this. The ultimate test of global good governance will be about how we manage sustainable development in this world of population growth, rapid urbanisation, the depletion of natural resources, and climate change. Climate change will have major impact - rising sea levels will cause – some people say - a tenth of Bangladesh’s population to have to move home – equivalent to more than all the people who live in Greater London. In sub-Saharan Africa, where a third of men, women and children are already malnourished, climate change could mean that food production is reduced by a fifth. Higher temperatures and shorter rainy seasons in Tanzania are expected to cut the main food crop, maize, by a third, making more people even more hungry. Even poorer. Competition over natural resources already causes conflict. Climate change will make this worse. By 2025, only 20 years away, more than 3 billion people could be affected by serious water shortages. Some argue – the UNDP report might - that we need a new agricultural revolution for water – a “blue revolution” to ensure the gains in food production are not wiped out as rivers run dry and underground reservoirs empty. Our interest in all of this is that climate change is a problem caused by the rich countries which is having the greatest impact on poor countries. We cannot ignore the impact of our own actions on the climate, nor can we deny developing countries the chance to grow and to reduce poverty. The truth is if we if we don’t do something about climate change, aid from rich countries will look pitiful by comparison with the consequences and the costs for developing countries. So, what can we do? The task for all of us, here at home, or abroad, remains the same – we must stabilise greenhouse gases at a level which avoids dangerous climate change. This is very ambitious, it will take time, and it requires action from all of us. And the main way we’ll achieve it is to get international agreement to commitments for the period after 2012. Everyone – rich and poor countries - must be signed up to this agreement if it is to be effective. Last year - 2005 - Gleneagles – was all about getting agreement on the science of climate change. This battle has largely been won – even former sceptics now agree that climate change is real, and that human activity is making it worse. This year we want to get agreement on the economics – understanding the implications and coming up with sound, rational policies for reducing the impact and helping countries adapt to what we know will happen in the most cost-effective and equitable way. This is what the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, due out soon, is all about. At the same time, countries are not going to sign up to commitments if they do not have the finances or the technical capacity to meet them. So, we need to increase public and private investment in lower-carbon energy and energy efficiency, and work to expand the development of technologies that will help all of us use less carbon. We are working with the World Bank and regional development banks on this. Finally, whatever we do from now on, some climate change - due to current and historical greenhouse gas emissions – will happen anyway, so we are working with developing countries to help them adapt and build resilience to changes. Just as good governance or climate change requires international action for progress to be made, so to do we need to do more to make the international development system work better in the 21st Century. But when we look at the principal institutions of multilateralism – the United Nations, the IMF and World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the European Union – their chief characteristic is that they all emerged out of the end of the Second World War. They were built for the challenges of 50 years ago; to re-build war torn Europe and Japan and to prevent the cold war becoming a third world war. If we were going to create this system now, it would look much different. First, we have got to move quicker on reform of the United Nations – changes to the membership of the Security Council so that our changed world is better represented – but also in its development work. Gordon Brown was appointed by Kofi Annan to work on a high level panel to review how the United Nations development system can better meet the challenges of the 21st Century. And developing countries have had a strong voice in the consultation process. The aim is to create an effective UN that takes its rightful place at the heart of the multilateral development system. The report will be published on 9th November. The UN must speed up existing reforms in order to establish:
Changes proposed for the main UN organisations need to support this vision of “One UN” and donors must provide more reliable and predictable funding to realise it. We are also making progress on integrating the UN humanitarian system so that it responds faster when crisis strikes. In the past, the UN has operated like an unfunded fire service - imagine the local fire station here rushing around when there is a fire – not to put it out, but to raise the money they need so that they can do so! Well this year we’ve set up a new UN Central Emergency Response Fund. The Fund, of which the UK is the largest donor at £40m a year over the next 4 years, has so far received $274 million from 54 donors since its launch. This is already helping to ensure a quicker response when emergencies strike, and the channelling of money to forgotten emergencies that are out of the media spotlight. The international financial institutions need to reform too. The IMF and the World Bank have done much to improve their effectiveness, and are doing more now to address their legitimacy. Last month in Singapore the IMF took the first steps in a process of reform. I welcome this and we will continue to support developing countries to ensure this reform delivers its stated objective of increasing their voice and participation in the Fund. The Bank must now also return to this issue and agree changes that give the poorest countries a real say in the policies and programmes that affect them. Ensuring they have the space to take forward and be responsible for their own development – it’s about how much countries “own” the programmes that are supported by the World Bank. That’s why I recently announced I was considering withholding money from the Bank - because I felt they needed to demonstrate that they had improved their approach to conditionality. Increasing voice also means it needs to be listened to. It’s a point you have made Ngaire, and I think we need to do more to develop the right incentives for these institutions to do so. Finally, our aid will be more effective if we can help reform the international development system – and in ways that improve governance and not undermine it – making countries more accountable to their citizens, rather than to us, their donors. It’s hard for poor countries to plan for long-term investments when much aid is so unreliable. Some studies show that is four times as volatile as tax revenues in developing countries. And it gets worse, the more aid dependent a country is. It’s why we are working hard to agree long-term commitments with the countries we work with, and why we are trying to persuade others to do the same. We have new 10-year agreements in Rwanda, Vietnam and Afghanistan. Gordon Brown and myself have committed DFID to increasing our support to education over the next 10 years to £8.5 billion – with 10 year funding already agreed with Mozambique and Ghana. At the World Bank meetings in Singapore we discussed 10-year education plans from 15 African countries, and the European Commission is reviewing its approaches to budget support. All with the purpose of making our aid more predictable. Another challenge, however, is the need to finance recurrent costs. Much aid is short term and is focused on capital investment. But it’s no good building schools or clinics without having the teachers and nurses to staff them – there is a staffing crisis now, and it will only get worse. And rapidly expanding water provision also means increased operation and maintenance costs. Social security payments that protect the vulnerable, mean on-going cash support. We know that it will take many years for poor countries – decades in the case of those most dependent on aid - to grow their economies sufficiently to provide the resources they need, through tax, to pay these recurrent costs. Clearly we need to do more to help countries achieve faster growth, but I’d also like the Bank and the Fund to take a longer term view of the financing needs of those countries furthest away from the Millennium Development Goals. We have to bite the bullet and accept that we need to be, and will be, supporting the efforts of these countries for a long time to come. And we need to make the international development system more accountable. One proposal we have made is to have an independent organisation monitor aid commitments, allocations and performance. The OECD Development Assistance Committee could do this, but it would need more capacity. We also need to make sure that different sectors – education, health, water and others – report on progress and funding needs so that the whole international community is bought to account for helping countries meet the Millennium Development Goals. And this will also mean overcoming the unequal way aid is distributed, which leaves some countries unaided. So, that’s what’s on my mind. What’s on yours? __________________________________________________________________ |