No MDGs for Africa, says World Bank

By Roberts Offor-Amankwah, Accra, Ghana
Africa would have to forget 2015 to meet the millennium development goals (MDGs) of reducing hunger, poverty and disease as a new report by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said there was still little on ground to show that the continent could tackle its decades old problems. 2015 is less than 10 years away.
The new report released last month and entitled "The Global Monitoring Report 2005: From Consensus to Momentum," is a five-year stocktake of Africa's progress in meeting the MDGs set at a UN summit in September 2000 and endorsed by more than 180 world leaders. A similar report is expected by 2010.The MDGs constitute the driving force for the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), first held in 2003 at Geneva to make the international community focus on eradicating poverty, achieving political stability and peace in the world’s least developed counties (LDCs) where volatile political cultures have kept economies underdeveloped.

Specifically, the WSIS targets for 2015 include connecting villages with ICTs and establishment of community access points; connecting universities, colleges, secondary schools and primary schools with ICTs; connecting scientific and research centres with ICTs; connecting public libraries, cultural centres, museums, post offices, and archives with ICTs; and connecting health centres and hospitals with ICTs. Others are connecting all local and central government departments and establishment of websites and email addresses; adapting all primary and secondary curricula to meet the challenges of the information society taking into account national circumstances; and ensuring all the world’s populations have access to television and radio services.

The goals have remained unsustainable because sub-Saharan African remains a region ravaged by internecine war as is the case in Cote D’Ivoire or Sierra Leone and Liberia still fatigued by wars that destroyed their economic fabrics. Much of the economies within the West African sub-region still has to contend monetary stability, debt sustainability and debt relief. Though much has happened to open up the economies by way of deregulation and liberalisation of key sectors such as telecommunications and energy, the report by the Breton Wood institutions noted that real competition in supportive sectors have not been encouraging to make the gains in sectors already deregulated have any serious impact. In Nigeria for instance, failure to deregulate the power sector has made investment in the telecommunications sector one of the costliest in the world, though the presence of a large market has tended to mitigate this shortcoming.

Africa’s ICT landscape may appear to be undergoing rapid and positive changes but behind all these, noted one of the report’s main authors, World Bank's Zia Qureshi, is the cold data on the MDGs are real people, and lack of progress has real and tragic consequences. "Every week, 200,000 children under five die of disease. "Every week 10,000 women die giving birth. In sub-Saharan Africa alone this year, two million people will die of AIDS. Worldwide, more than 100 million children in developing countries are not in school."
The report warned that Africa, the world’s poorest continent with over 300 million living on less that one dollar a day had no chance of meeting the goals. “At stake are not just the prospects for hundreds of millions of people to escape poverty, hunger and disease, but also prospects for long-term security and peace, which are intrinsically tied to development," said out-going president of the World Bank James Wolfensohn.
To accelerate growth and reduce poverty, governments in the region would have to reduce the policy risks associated with doing business in the area. Foreign direct investment is unlikely to be sustained except barriers to competition are eliminated in a continent where strong arguments are still put up to defend governments’ unwholesome involvement in business.

More…..

Back To Top