ROBERT C. ORR: Thank you very much, Gail.
I think I want to start with an observation that if you had told me a decade ago that we'd be sitting at the Council on Foreign Relations a decade hence talking about a thing called the MDGs, I think I would have laughed in your face.
Put me down as one of the original skeptics of the MDGs. At the time they were created, I remember having an argument with someone who was then at the U.N., and I was not then at the U.N. I said, since when do you do development by goal-setting?
I've never quite seen that work. And I think I can say here today, I was proven wrong. The fact is that a decade hence, goal-setting has been a tremendously powerful tool. But it's been a very unevenly powerful tool.
And what we saw last week was the power of the MDGs in the developing world, in particular that the mobilization that has happened, around the MDGs as a concept altogether and individual MDGs, and not just at the government level but at the civil society level -- that entire societies have organized around the MDGs -- has been something that we have lacked.
We've talked about forever country ownership and national ownership of development. The MDGs have given those constituencies something to organize around. I think the meetings here in New York over the last couple weeks have really been quite striking, that in the most adverse environment possible for development and for investing in development, we saw some major new moves forward.
And that came not just from governments and not from traditional donors but from in particular the developing countries, the NGOs, foundations not just in the United States and northern governments but foundation world -- the foundation world in different parts of the world.
So as a mobilizational tool, I think a lot came out. At the most political level, the other big development is that this is now considered fair for leaders to talk about. Even when the MDGs were created, they were created by the experts.
The leaders blessed the idea of MDGs, and then it went into expert land. And it kind of worked its way back up the chain. And it took a decade to fully get all the way up the chain. But one decade out, leaders owned this agenda.
It was striking that leaders could get well off their talking points and knew exactly where they were in their countries, on which MDGs and on which targets and which ones were moving more slowly. That level of political ownership at the top of the chain is new. It's exciting.
Clearly the progress is uneven. And I think all the reports that led up to the summit, the gap reports about where we're falling short -- not just geographically but in which MDGs -- have shined a light on the different organizational problems we have for different MDGs.
The one that I think we made the most progress with last week was the one that we've moved the slowest on. And that is on maternal health. This has been the perennial basement-dweller of the MDGs.
And two years ago, the secretary-general set out to try to both figure out and then organize around the weakest performers of the MDGs, because there is a potential strategy of just riding the winners, both in terms of countries and in MDGs.
And you could gain statistical achievement of the MDGs by riding China, riding India, riding growth in parts of the world. But very specifically we have to do exactly the opposite. We have to go after the hardest places and the hardest issues. And maternal health has been the most resistant to change, the most stubborn.
And last week because of a two-year-long effort, of mobilizing all the different constituencies around women's and children's health, we saw a very strong coalition come together. And we saw 192 governments actually agree on an approach to women's and children's health. Given the food fight that we've seen over decades in this area, that's a significant development.
But then on top of that to see major new commitments against the toughest, slowest-moving MDGs and women's and children's health come simultaneously was a new development that the -- instead of kind of the cycle to the bottom that has been driven by the economic circumstances, we started to actually see a cycle to the top kind of driving forward, that when NGOs -- when governments saw what NGOs were doing and committing for women's and children's health, they did more.
And then when people in one part of the world saw that others were doing more, they did more. So I think last week was significant in terms of agreeing to an overall game plan, for the forced march that will be the next five years, to achieve the MDGs.
But we saw the political mobilization. We saw new constituencies come out together. And we saw major new commitments. Obviously it's all about what happens on the ground. But if you had given me the option a year ago, to say this is where you'll be at the end of your summit, I would have taken that deal in a heartbeat.
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Haiti 5by WheresNorthFromHere138 views
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