KOMMENTAR
Af Carin Norberg
Direktør for Nordiska Afrikainstitutet (NAI), Uppsala, Sverige
The Millennium Development Goals (2015 Målene) are the best documented development goals ever adopted by the UN. In 2010 only five years will remain until the time frame for achieving the eight goals runs out.
The discussion of ”Beyond the Millennium Goals” has already started and at the recent European Development Days in Stockholm this issue was central for several of the panels.
Despite the attention to the goal of reducing poverty in the world by 50 percent until 2015 the results have been limited. The advances made in the past decade are currently threatened by the global financial crisis.
An overview shows that per capita incomes in many states are falling and that poverty is increasing (typically for Africa), that some countries have made great advances (China and India in particular), and that inequality of income between and within countries is rising towards what many would call “Latin American” proportions.
Under the leadership of Professor Thandika Mkandawire UNRISD has initiated a research project titled Social Policy in a Development Context. Professor Mkandawire wanted to study how countries that had succeeded in reducing poverty had actually worked.
The conclusion was that the state had played a decisive role in countries where poverty had been substantially reduced, that general welfare systems aiming at providing the entire population a better life were common and that an active social policy had an important role in strengthening the democratic institutions of these countries.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book “Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better” have reached similar conclusions.
Their main point is that the more unequal a country is the worse will be the status of its people, measured in welfare terms (average life span, infant mortality, obesity, crime rate, ability to read etc.). Rich countries are no exception.
Per capita income means less than the gap between the richest and poorest 20 percent of the population.
The Nordic Africa Institute is currently working with the Institute for Future Studies, the Swedish Institute for social Studies and Rhodes University in South Africa on a research project titled Transformative Social Policy , to develop the UNRISD proposals into a research agenda for countries in Africa.
The preliminary conclusion is that Poverty is Politics. Reducing poverty on a global and national level requires a conscious political program. figthing poverty is fundamentally a political and not a technical issue.
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