Six years ago, the international community agreed upon the Millennium Declaration, which was unanimously adopted by the member states of the United Nations in September 2000.
The document set out eight goals that are commonly referred to as the Millennium Development Goals – MDGs. They commit the international community to an expanded vision of development, one that promotes human development as the key to sustaining social and economic progress, and recognizes the importance of creating a global partnership for development.
The goals have been commonly accepted as a framework for measuring development progress. It is the aim to achieve the eight goals by 2015.
The eight goals are: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development.
In Zambia, the government’s new sector-wide approach toward funding is meant to address the goals. In fact, the Zambian government has reported that, at least in education, it expects to reach many of the goals.
But that remains to be seen, said Stephen St. Michael, director of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) Program Support Unit (PSU).
“One is never quite sure about the data that has gone into saying that. Frankly, we’re going into an election year (in Zambia) so you have to take with a grain of salt some of the things you hear on the news,” Mr. St. Michael said.
“It’s a tough go in Zambia. You’re looking at a situation where health and education require a lot of support. They have been getting more support...but there is still a long way to go.”
Opa Kapijimpanga, a consultant with the CIDA PSU in Zambia, said although the Zambian government has accepted the notion of the Millennium Development Goals, attaining them is not at the forefront of their plans.
“If you look at the budget, the idea of MDGs is only mentioned once. I think everybody has the MDGs at the back of their minds, but it is not an operational kind of indicator,” he said.
“The (Zambian) Ministry of Health is operating at 50 per cent capacity in terms of human resources. They are supposed to have about 46,000 people employed as front-line health workers in this country. There are only 26,000 at the moment.
“So for them to increase service delivery, they need at least to deal with the human resource crisis,” he said, adding there are also issues of retention because of the low salaries offered.
“There is this migration of nurses and doctors to Europe. People don’t want to stay in the rural areas because the conditions in the health clinics are poor. There are no gloves, no syringes. So in that context, people don’t see the MDGs as the key issue. There are more serious problems they have to worry about.”
And, according to Mr. St. Michael, “donors think in those terms, they speak in those terms and they plan in those terms...it’s talked about here, but it hasn’t really been internalized yet as a way of gauging performance. They have more immediate concerns (in Zambia). And they have more tangible ways of identifying and expressing those concerns.”
