 All right, good afternoon everyone, we will get started. My name is Talia Dubovie, I am the deputy director of the Global Health Policy Center here at CSIS, and it's my pleasure to welcome you this afternoon to do African children have an equal chance to unveil the Human Opportunity Report from the World Bank. We are gonna start out with some opening remarks by Ana Ravenga, who's the senior director of the poverty global practice at the World Bank. We are going to have a short introductory video that explains some of the concepts behind this report. We will turn it over to the two report authors, Andrew and Anbar, to talk, to walk through the findings and the main messages of the report, and then we will proceed to a panel where we will discuss what these findings mean for a policy audience. And at that point, I will ask you any questions, but we are hopeful that you will all participate and ask questions and engage in dialogue. So you have bios of everybody in the handout that you got when you checked in, so I'm not gonna walk through all of that now, and I'm gonna just turn it over to Ana to get us started. Pretty at the World Bank. I'm really pleased to be here just kicking us off. We are extremely lucky and I wanna start by thanking our hosts, the CSIS Africa program for partnering with us and for hosting us in this beautiful room. I think this is gonna be a really interesting discussion about using our report as background, but really an interesting discussion about equality of opportunity for children in Africa. I wanna thank our panelists from Save the Children from UNICEF, Michael, Ted, and also my own colleague from the World Bank, Chika Ferreira, for agreeing to be on the panel. I think they will share their thoughts with us and motivate what I hope will be a lively discussion. I wanna thank all of you who are here, but also those of us who are joining us online. And I think these days we talk a lot and we hear a lot about income inequality. It's in the news, it's in our conversations. I had my mother ask me whether she should buy and read the Piketty book. I told her it was perhaps a little long, but it's very much in the news. And yet income inequality, if we focus on outcomes, is something that will always be with us. There will always be differences in what people make. There will always be differences in wealth. Some of it reflect differences in effort, entrepreneurship, or skills. I think what we don't talk as much about, and I think this is one of the things that has been missing, I think from the recent focus on income inequality, is the much more pernicious kind of inequality that really underlies what we see, which is inequality of opportunity. Particularly inequality of opportunity at an early age. And this is what we're gonna be talking about today. Much of what we see as differences in outcomes at the end of the day start very early in life. And they start with very unequal access to very, very basic services. I think this is one of the most important challenges for policy makers around the world, particularly in poorer countries. And I think our panel, what I'm hoping our panel will do is react a bit to our report, but also really make us think about how do we make progress on this agenda. Now I think many of you have probably heard about the World Bank's new institutional goals. Ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity, by which we mean really promoting the incomes of the bottom 40% of the distribution in every country. To be able to help countries build societies with more economic and social mobility in societies where the productive potential of every person is harnessed, independent of their gender, their ethnicity, or their parental socioeconomic status. So for children in particular, we think what is essential is providing universal access to early childhood development, to education, health and nutrition, basic infrastructure services. And this is key to them developing then into being healthy and productive adults, being able to get good jobs, being able to move themselves and their children out of poverty. So what do we mean when we talk about equality of opportunity? You'll see a report that focuses a lot on that question and then attempts to measure it. And ultimately it really boils down to very a simple idea, which is that access to key fundamental services like clean water, education, sanitation, health should be equal for all children regardless of where they're born, what gender they are, how much money their parents make, what education their parents have. And unfortunately equality of opportunity is still very much an aspiration in many countries. I would even say that it's still not there even in quite high income countries for some groups of the population. Now I think if we talk a little bit about Africa and you will see some of this in the report. If we think about a rural child in a place like Mozambique we'll see that he or she is only about half as likely to have sanitation on the household as an urban child. If we look at a country like Rwanda which has made progress in many dimensions but only 20% of the poorest children have clean water at home compared to over 65% of the richest. And these inequalities are not just unfair. As I mentioned, the consequences of these inequalities play themselves out through a child's life and into adulthood. If you're born a poor girl in a rural area in a poor country, you can take a country like Nigeria. Your chances of going to school are much lower. Your chances of having clean water are much lower. You're much more likely to be stunted, much more likely to be sick from preventable diseases. You will probably be less able to go to school continuously. You'll probably learn less and you will be trapped in a cycle of poverty. And this is in fact very much the case. You will see some numbers today that show that in Nigeria girls, if you have a rural girl, access to a basic bundle of services is less than 20%. If you're thinking about a boy in an urban setting from a richer household, that access to that same bundle is over 80%. So enormous differences that really condition lives and opportunities, starting from the earliest childhood and well into adulthood. Unfortunately, as I said, it's still very far from a scenario where kids have real equality of opportunity, but there has been a lot of progress. And we really are convinced that working on this equality of opportunity sets the stage, levels of playing field for the future. And we'll be not just the recipe for more equitable societies but actually also for more productive and richer societies as well. So it's not just a question of fairness, it's also a question of, I would say, laying the foundations of growth and of smart economics as well. Now we have used these measures of equality of opportunity in our policy dialogues a lot. We started this dialogue in Latin America where they have contributed to building a strong focus on equity. We have examples from different countries. I was gonna mention one in Argentina, the province of Chaco, where essentially the municipalities are working to improve public service delivery and into their monitoring and evaluation tools they have incorporated these particular measures of equity of service delivery. I think in Latin America what we found is that approaching the issue of inequality from, it's very core from its roots in terms of equality of opportunity, opens the door to a policy dialogue that may otherwise not always be open. People can get very ideological about redistribution, but it's very hard to be ideological when you're talking about access to basic services for children and you're talking about giving every child the same chance, a fair chance. So this is something we do increasingly in other countries, some in Africa, Zambia, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire, we've done this regional report. We are doing this in places like Vietnam, Indonesia, also South Africa. And we have a, we compile this data on inequality of opportunity for every region in a very interactive visualizing equality dashboard that's available through our external website. So if you ever just wanna check in and look at a dimension of inequality and see how different countries and regions are doing, it's something that's very accessible and very user-friendly and very striking in the results. I mean, we see progress in a number of areas, particularly I think health and education, but really, really slow progress in areas such as access to clean water and sanitation. So progress is uneven and it prompts a question of why that is and what can be done about it. So before I give the floor to Ambar and Andrew, who are the authors of the report and are gonna share with us some of their main findings, we do wanna show you a very short video that I think illustrates the concept. The concept is a little bit complicated to measure, but actually quite intuitive at its origin. So let's watch the video and then we will move on to our two presenters. Thank you very much once again for being here today. Inequality is a major concern around the globe. A recent report by Oxfam calculated that almost half of the world's wealth is held by just 1% of the world's population. Nonetheless, you can argue that some inequality between people is not necessarily a bad thing. In particular, you can think about inequality of outcomes. Things like the amount of money a person makes or the kind of job they have as rewarding effort and superior life choices. But what about when a person's potential to achieve these outcomes is simply determined by the lottery of birth? We call this inequality of opportunity. Characteristics like gender, economic circumstances, geography and ethnicity can trap large groups of people in poverty and specifically affect access to basic services among children. For instance, only 5% of children in the poorest 40% of households in Madagascar have finished primary school. So what will it take to offer equal opportunities to children born into different circumstances across the world? Bringing a basic set of goods and services to disadvantaged people has a huge impact. Clean water, education, electricity and sanitation make a tremendous difference in early childhood. As these children grow into working-age adults, their skills, knowledge and health become essential to getting jobs, accelerating economic mobility and reducing inequality in the long run. For example, according to the Global Partnership for Education, if all students in low-income countries left school with basic reading skills, it could lead to an estimated 171 million people being lifted out of poverty. Okay, now how do we measure all this? To start with, we track coverage rates and coverage gaps for access to basic services among children. We've also used this data to develop the Human Opportunity Index. For each country, the index measures the availability of key basic services and how fairly they are distributed among the population. So if a country's services aren't equally accessible for different groups of its population, they'd score lower on the index than a country with services available to all. In other words, the Human Opportunity Index is coverage corrected for inequality. You can find out more about inequality of opportunity by exploring our visualized inequality dashboard. Okay, thank you very much. And thank you, everyone, for being here and to CSIS for hosting us. And before I start the presentation, I just wanted to start by thanking the very large team, and Andrew and I are here, representing actually a very large group of people, including people who worked on the data from our central unit, from the regions, and so on. The data that we use is exclusively from the demographic and health surveys. So that's, again, it's a great source of data for looking at poverty, inequality, and access to services. So I'm not gonna spend much time on this slide because I think that's what the video was about and what Anna was also talking about. And essentially, we are concerned about inequality of opportunity, which, as you have heard, it's about inequality which is attributable to the circumstances at birth. So that's basically what it is. Now, the various interpretations of how this type of inequality can be measured. So we have indices, for example, and we have actually one of the authors who has produced some of these indices sitting here, where you can actually estimate inequality of opportunity from incomes itself. So in other words, you take overall distribution of income and you see which part of that inequality is actually attributable to differences between groups. So that's one way of measuring inequality of opportunity. The kind of measure that we are talking about are essentially looking at children and looking at their access to opportunities. We're not trying to be exhaustive. In other words, we do not claim that having access to this minimal bundle of opportunities, which is essentially school attendance, immunization, relatively clean water, improved source of sanitation, not being stunted, that these actually ensure a level playing field for everyone, necessarily. But this is where one starts. This is the basic minimum that everyone should have. And in addition to that, you need much more. But even if we start at that level, what we are going to show you, that while progress has been made, there are enormous challenges that you see in the 20 African countries that we've studied. So the Human Opportunity Index is, as the video was trying to show that in a very sort of a quick exposition, but let me just explain it a little bit. So what it is essentially, it is not just about inequality of opportunity. It's coverage corrected for inequality of opportunity. In other words, 100% coverage of a particular service, let's say safe water, the Human Opportunity Index is going to be 100%, right? One or 100%. If coverage, on the other hand, was let's say 50%, and that's where the Human Opportunity Index actually adds value to your normal coverage rate. Because what it's going to do is that it's going to take the 50% coverage rate, and then it's going to measure, then it's going to penalize that 50% for the inequality of opportunity. In other words, the extent to which that 50% coverage is unequally distributed across groups with different types of circumstances. So depending on the extent of inequality or inequality of opportunity, the Human Opportunity Index is going to be less than 50%. So that's what we mean by coverage corrected for equity. So it's an inequality-sensitive coverage rate. It depends on the account coverage and whether it's allocated in an equitable way where equity is defined in terms of whether the groups defined by the circumstances, gender at birth, gender, let's say, household income at birth, location, and so on. So these are the circumstances, and these circumstances define groups across which the inequality is measured. Why do we focus on children? And there are two basic reasons, which are really fundamental reasons. One is, of course, the whole question of mobility, which is that inequality of outcomes today is partly a reflection of inequality of opportunity in the past, no matter how you measure those opportunities, whether you measure it by Human Opportunity Index, whether you use a more expanded definition of opportunities, you can very easily see that a lot of the inequality in outcomes today is a result of inequality of opportunity in the past. So there's a whole aspect of mobility when we talk about people moving out of poverty within and across generations. This is one area we have to focus on, the access to basic services and a broader set of opportunities at birth. And secondly, which is, of course, related, which is the differences in opportunities during childhood and especially during early childhood can have lifelong impacts. And this is a point that James Heckman famously, among many others, have made a number of times. And essentially what you find is that interventions early on in life are even cost efficient because correcting the inequalities at birth later on is actually much more costly and less efficient. So even if you come from a point of completely sort of agnostic point of view of cost efficiency and so on, it makes a lot of sense to focus on children. So here is basically the graphical exposition of the example that Anna was giving, which is to what extent the circumstances matter. And here is a quick visual glimpse. So what we are doing is that we are just estimating the probability of accessing, we are calling it a basic bundle of services relevant for a particular age group, which in this case is six to 11 years. And the bundle of services, it's very basic. It's attending school, improved sources of water and sanitation, and we take two different children with contrasting profiles. One, a girl of age six and 11 living in a rural household, in a poor rural household and headed by a woman with no years of education, with no education. And child B, which has exactly the sort of the opposite profile. And this graph basically shows you what's the difference in probability of accessing a bundle, which includes all these three. And you can see that even just focus on one number, which is Malawi. So if child A, which is the more vulnerable child, if this person were to live in Malawi, she's actually better off in terms of access to these services compared to all other countries. But even in Malawi, the difference between her probability of access to this bundle and that of the more fortunate child is as much as 40%. If you go to some of these other countries, it's as high as 85%. So this is just to illustrate how circumstances actually matter. So what we're doing in the study, we are using demographic health services and demographic and health service, DHS. And it includes 20 countries, which account for about 73% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa. We cannot include all because we need a data source, which is fairly decent. We covered the period roughly between 1998 and 2008. There's some variation because of data availability. And for most countries, we have data for both these periods. So what do we mean by opportunities? And again, caveatting that, we're not trying to be exhaustive. We don't get, there is obviously, this is a very basic set of opportunities we are looking at. So under opportunities, we essentially, the guiding principle is essentially we're trying to find services which society agrees is critical for individual development. And the Millennium Development Goals, which reflect the consensus between countries in terms of what the basic opportunities should be, I think is a useful guiding principle. And these are also services for universality as a valid social objective. So that's kind of one standard we use. So you have these described under education, where we have attendance, we have some proxies for, we don't want to use the word quality so much, but that's what it's trying to get at, whether you start primary school on time, whether you finish primary school by a certain age, access to water, sanitation, and so on. On the right-hand side, you have circumstances, which includes, first of all, child circumstances, child characteristics. Now, of course, DHS is a very rich data set. So it actually lets you identify a whole set of circumstances. So we have child characteristics, we have the composition of households, the location, household head characteristics. We include a variable on parental presence because in a lot of these countries, especially the conflict affected countries, it really matters because orphan status is associated with a lot of different vulnerabilities. And of course, we have socioeconomic status. So just to give you a quick glimpse of some of the results and I'll start and then Andrew will take over. So first of all, the positive part of the story, and there are actually a lot of positives. And this graph basically shows, I think, what we take the biggest positive. Simply speaking, essentially for over half of all opportunity, for every country we see improvement, and by improvement we mean statistically significant improvement in the Human Opportunity Index, which means, remember, the Human Opportunity Index improves if coverage increases, or inequality goes down, or both. And you see a statistically significant improvement in all the countries for at least half the opportunities. The graph basically shows where the improvements, where you see the most improvements. When we look at the opportunity bundle, and that's one way of summarizing a lot of information on different indicators into sort of a single indicator, when we look at the opportunity bundle, one thing that we're interesting to see is that, and this graph essentially shows the extent of improvement, the average annual rate of improvement over a roughly 10 year period, and the bars that you see there essentially shows the confidence intervals. So you want the entire bar to be on the right hand side of the line, which shows zero, in order for it to be a statistically significant improvement. Now this you can see, that if you take two different bundles, one is for the older children, and one is for the younger children, it's for the older children that you see improvements in all countries almost. You don't see it for younger children. But what is happening here? It's basically a product of there being a lot more improvement in school enrollments as opposed to full immunization, okay? Because a bundle for the younger children includes water, sanitation, stunting, and full immunization, and one for the older children includes school attendance, and water and sanitation. So the difference is essentially coming from the difference between the progress that you see, which is a lot on school attendance, and I'm gonna show that, and the relative lack of improvements you see in some of the health indicators, which includes stunting and immunization. We also see convergence. We see gaps between the lagging and the leading countries declining, and there's one way of showing it, which is just measuring the coefficient of variation for the human opportunity index of every opportunity across countries. So coefficient of variation is a standard division divided by the mean, so if the bar goes down, it means there is less variation across countries, and you see this happening for all the indicators, all the indicators of opportunities that we have. Another manifestation of the same convergence story, and by convergence again, I mean the gaps between the leading, the countries we started off in a better position as opposed to the lagging countries. The gaps between them declining is the gap between anglophone and francophone countries. So what you see here, the graph on the left is 1998, difference between anglophone and francophone, and you can see the large gaps with the anglophones being generally the leading countries. There's a lot of variation within these groups, so these are averages, and you can see that the gap is declining, and you can see it in many different ways. Whichever way you measure it, you see the gaps between the leading and the lagging countries declining over time. At the same time, the improvements, and I was alluding a bit to that when I was talking about the bundle, the improvements are uneven across opportunities. So you see larger improvements in school attendance, and that's almost everywhere, than in starting primary school on time or finishing primary school where a certain age, which matter for education quality. And there is a persisting issue of low coverage with high inequality of opportunity for infrastructure where the improvements have been extremely uneven. So this is basically showing that. This is showing you the status in 2008. The bars represent the coverage, the dots represent the human opportunity index, the gap between the bar and the dot is measuring the extent of inequality. That's the way to look at it. So if you just look at the dots, you can see that, well actually, it's the dots which represent the coverage, the bars represent the human opportunity index. So if you look at all the bars, you can see that the picture is much better in 2008 on school attendance compared to starting primary school on time and finishing primary school on time. Similar story on access to basic infrastructure, you can see the improvements have taken place but where we are currently is first of all, a lot of variation across countries. And frankly, a lot of countries where a small minority of the children are actually covered by even the more basic standards of water and sanitation. A mixed picture in immunization and nutrition. In nutrition, it's interesting and here we're measuring stunting. So what you see is that a remarkable degree of consistency across countries, but none of them are near 100%. So there's a big challenge there but the cross-country variation is less. In immunization, again, it's a very mixed picture. You have countries like Rwanda and Malawi which have made enormous progress. I mean, not showing the progress here but they've made enormous progress compared to some of the other countries including some very low numbers for countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia. We are measuring full immunization and it actually makes a difference whether you measure just measles or partial immunization or full immunization. All of which basically coming back to the same point that if you combine all of this, what you see is relatively low access of the basic bundle of opportunities and particularly for the younger children and which is essentially a result of the performance being much better on the education side on school attendance as opposed to immunization. Obviously it depends on how we define these basic bundles. If I were to include starting and finishing primary school in time in the basic bundle, the picture would look quite different. Does it work? Okay. So just to take off from where my colleague Amber said, so we obviously think that circumstances matter. So the reason why in fact you get these low bundles of services or opportunities is because circumstances matter. And circumstances matter in the following sense. So let me give you a very simple illustration. So take one of those opportunities, right? Let's say access to flush or toilet, latrine, right? And let's say you find out that for one country, take one country and you find out that there's this huge problems of access and you want to try and understand what is explaining that. So you're trying to decompose what is explaining this lack of access to this thing. If you just look at this graph, basically this tells you that what proportion of that lack of access is explained by these different factors, right? One of them could be that in fact, that the household happens to be in rural area. So that's location, you see green. The other one happens to be maybe the mother is not well educated or the father for that matter, right? Head of Education is low, right? So as you see for each one of these, they're three that really, really dominate the explanation and that these are wealth which we consider to be mostly, well, the wealth here because of the DHS is actually just asset holdings, right? The kind of assets they hold. And one of them is a location which is Avanor Ruro and the other big one is Head of Education. I mean the education of the head of the household, right? So if you just look at a specific opportunity, then this is what the decomposition will tell you, right? What we did here is actually take the 10 top most unequal countries and take the averages and it is still consistent. Those are the three biggest contributors to this lack of opportunities, right? It's all the differences in opportunities. However, it's our view that in fact, policy did make a difference, right? So now take the opposite example, right? If you happen to actually take a particular country and you wanted to find out between 1998 and 2008, if there was a decrease in the gap, right? If there was some improvement, what explains that improvement, right? So the first picture was a very static one. What explains these differences within a country of particular year across this population? This one is within the same country, right? What explains actually the progress that they've made, right? And what we find out is that we did this composition for three things, right? So the first one, which we call equalization, is if in fact the opportunities increased proportionately for each particular circumstance group, okay? So that is the blue. And then the orange, I think that's the color, right? It's orange, is actually if these opportunities favored populations that were originally excluded from having access to these opportunities, right? Usually this is the kind of stuff we associate with government action or policy, right? And the third is composition, which is basically that supposing in fact that the proportion or the share of the circumstance groups change. So for example, let's say one circumstance group take the example that my colleague Amber started with, which is a girl who is six years old, who lives in rural areas and who lives with a mother who has no education. That's a circumstance group, right? For example, right? So if the proportion of population in those circumstance groups changes, that would be the explanation of, in the green bars will be the proportion that's explained by that. And as you can see, the stuff that dominates here is the scale. And the scale is really that these improvements have actually favored groups that were originally excluded from these opportunities, right? So that's the sense in which we say actually that policy matter a great deal. Now, and these opportunities have actually improved for all kinds of countries, right? As my colleague explained. And you can see here that the graphs that you see on the left, basically explain how much in percentage terms the opportunities have improved relative to, I mean, compared to, say, the GDP per capita for every level of GDP per capita. And as you can see that, in fact, for countries that have relatively low GDP, there have been a lot of countries that have improved. There are also countries where, so in that sense, you can see that everyone has improved. There's a shift of the graph, the blue graph to the left, is it called? Yeah, to the left. And that is actually an explanation that in fact these improvements have happened across income groups. Not just the rich countries have improved. But what's happening is that, of course, there are big gaps that still exist. One thing that you will see is that African countries have actually closed the gap between, say, countries like Latin America that have improved opportunities a lot for their populations in one dimension, which is school attendance. But in other dimensions that are equally important, for example, in the completion of primary school, that hasn't happened nearly as well. So you can see, for example, these graphs, on the left, the graphs for African countries show much larger bars. That's the growth rate in improvement in school attendance is much larger than Latin America. That's because Latin America already has very high levels of school attendance, so the changes are gonna be tiny. But on the other hand, if you look at completion rates, in Latin America, there have been huge improvements for the same period or more or less, while in Africa there hasn't been nearly as much. And this is the same story. On the left is basically school attendance and you can see that in fact, the enrollment rates are converging with Latin America. Africa is the blue bus and Latin America is the orange bus. And you can see that in fact, there's significant convergence, especially at the top performers. They're almost similar to Latin America, except countries like, what's that, Niger, Niger, I guess. However, but finishing primary school on time is significantly poorer, much, much lower for Africa. And it's even worse if you actually, it's even worse if you actually look at things like infrastructure. By infrastructure here we mean access to electricity, which is one example, but access to sanitation, clean water, and so on, right? These are very important sort of inputs to human capital, especially of children, because it improves their health and future productivity. So in this case, as you can see, I mean the distance between the Latin American performance and African countries is even worse than if you look at things like education. And these differences don't go away if in fact you're controlled for income, right? As you can see, for example, on the left side, so this will be the HOIs, so the Human Opportunity Index is weighted by income levels, right? And you can see that in Africa, except for a few countries like Ghana and Senegal, the rest of them hardly even, the percent hardly even comes close to half what you see in Latin America, for example. All right, so that basically summarizes, for the most part, the findings of the report. What do we find? So let's recap what we find, right? So there's been much progress that's been made. Whether you consider them across countries, bundle of opportunities, single opportunities, there have been much progress that have been made. The gaps between countries that are basically better performing and those that were lagging behind has closed, so that's good news. But there is a lack of progress, especially in the infrastructure opportunities. There's been progress, especially on education, but substantially much less for infrastructure opportunities. And the most important thing is we also see that in fact the opportunities have been much better for all the children, but not for the very young children. And what the research in recent years is telling us is that in fact the opportunity for younger children is consequential, even in adult life, right? So I think one of the frontier things that the governments in Africa probably need to invest in and do and put a lot more effort in is actually to try and improve opportunities for much younger children going forward. So that summarizes, so. Thanks very much, Anna, Andrew and Anbar for that presentation, and now we will turn to a discussion of those findings. Joining me on stage are Michael Klossin, the Vice President for Policy and Humanitarian Response at Save the Children, Ted Scheiben, the Director of Programs for UNICEF, and Francisco Ferreira, the Chief Economist for the Africa Region at the World Bank. So, Michael, starting with you, in February Save the Children published a report The Lottery of Birth, which looks at similar issues, inequality of opportunity. Could you walk us through a little bit the findings of that report? To what extent do they reinforce what we've just heard? Are there any differences in, let's say, the children found? Sure, no, thank you for that. And I hope everybody goes on our website and takes a look at it. And I was delighted to see that the World Bank is also using the same term, Lottery of Birth, in their report there. I think the good news is that, and as many in this room know, we've seen really dramatic progress in reducing child mortality over the last 20 years. I mean, we've cut in half the child mortality rate, and there's probably 17,000 more children that are alive each day now than was the case in 1990. So the good news is, and again, it was reinforced by what you saw in those graphs. There's been tremendous progress. The challenge is that there's still a lot of children that are not benefiting in that progress. There's another 17,000 children that are dying every day, nowadays, 6.3 million, roughly, across the world. And it's not randomly distributed. It really is based on things like the wealth of a parent or of your parents. It's based on where you live, urban or rural. It's based on maybe the geography of your home, whether what part of the country you're in. And it's based on your ethnicity, and hence the Lottery of Birth. And again, I think the Save the Children report has a very similar perspective as the work that our colleagues from the World Bank have done, which is that this is not fair. And it needs to be tackled for a variety of reasons. I think what we'd say is that, so our report took a look at, similarly to the World Bank effort, although we focused really on the health area. We looked at child survival. We didn't look across a whole set of other sort of indicators for children. And we looked at child survival. And what the report found was that, and it used the DHS data, the mixed data, and so forth. And we worked the data with ODI in London. And what the report found was that, in about three quarters of the country that we studied, that at least one group was falling behind, even though there was overall reduction in mortality. Some of that, some people were benefiting more than others. So particular groups were being left out from the progress. And in about, I think it was roughly 16% of the countries. All of the four groups that we studied, that gap was increasing in all four groups. So I think that that's the bad news is that we've, in a way, we've cut in half the child mortality rate, but we've actually, there's still large groups that where a lot more work remains to be done. So I would, rather than get into a lot of detail, I simply would say that, as I think our World Bank colleagues saw, finish on some good news, which is that it can be done. There are some policy solutions. They're at the international level. We can talk about the opportunity offered by the Sustainable Development Goals to tackle this issue. There's opportunities in national policy, and there's certainly programmatic opportunities. And I'm happy to, as we go through this conversation to get into other areas. So, I mean, good news, the progress is being made. Bad news is that groups are being left out. Good news is that there are ways to tackle that. And that's, in a sense, the report. Wonderful, thanks. But please read it. Turning to you, Ted, UNICEF's mission is specifically to reach the most disadvantaged children and the neediest of countries. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit in your work, what have you seen in terms of policy approaches at the local or the national level that is most effective in addressing these inequalities? Sure, and first let me say thank you for both the report and for this event. I mean, any event that allows us to speak about equity and equal opportunities for children really advances child rights. So it's really appreciated that we're here together today. And there's any number of directions I could take your question, but I want to put a couple of markers down for further discussion over the next hour and start really by the whole issue of, and you know, where Michael left off, which is kind of some of the, you know, what can only be called the revolution and the reduction of under five mortality. And what it illustrates as a key approach to making progress, not just in the area of health, but I think across the board, which is really the importance of doubling down on the community approach. And where we've seen progress is in places where countries have decided to invest at community level in decentralizing their services and making those available at the doorstep of families and villages. And deciding that for every 5,000 people we're gonna have a primary healthcare unit that we're gonna have community schools that are based close to the household that we're gonna allow access to services in a way that's easy and decentralized and equitable. And you know, when you look at some of what's been achieved in the area of health it's been work on pneumonia, work on diarrheal diseases, work on malaria, work on severe acute malnutrition and indeed, you know, not full immunization but measles and the immense progress on measles. And this has been achieved at community level with health workers focusing on primary healthcare who don't need an enormous amount of training but can achieve enormous results and we can double down on those approaches and systematize them in a way that places that don't yet have those services can get to those services. That approach is equally true in education. It's increasingly true in sub-Saharan Africa in the area of social protection which is now a program at scale in many countries. Couple more points while I have the floor again for further discussion. One is, I think the SDGs offer enormous opportunities both in terms of the unfinished business of the MDGs a lot of which we're talking about today but also in terms of the next generation of issues where we're also gonna have equity questions, issues around obesity which is gonna occur in the same place where we have severe malnutrition. Issues around secondary education. We've done a good job getting children into school. They're not completing primary education and the quality of what they're learning still needs to be addressed but we're also gonna have issues around secondary education. And issues around violence and protection which we're missing in the MDGs and now are now in the SDGs. Part of the reason why children don't stay in school is because of issues of violence and protection and so it's not just decentralizing the service it's also making it a safe service and an available service for family. Last point again to provoke discussion that I'd like to make is the data here is from 98 to 2008. There's been further progress since 2008 and some of the countries that look like they have high inequities and where there are serious issues places like Ethiopia, places like Rwanda, places like Kenya have actually made enormous progress since 2008. But there's a part of Africa which neither shows here nor today is making as much progress as the rest of Africa. And I think it's a part that we need specifically to focus on and we have in some ways an opportunity to do so. And that part is that whole part that goes from the Sahel over to Liberia, Sierra Leone and some of those countries, Sierra Leone having some of the highest maternal and under five mortality rates in the world. Terrible tragedy with Ebola but as we're getting to zero and moving beyond Ebola how can we see this as an opportunity to reinvest in systems that reduce inequity that increase access to services that build resilience in that part of Africa which is not well represented in these slides and which is a part which we really need to focus on if we're looking at issues of equity and the quality of opportunity. Thanks very much. And to you Francisco, who needs to do what in taking this kind of research and translating it into action? Where, recognizing that a lot of this work needs to be done at a local and national level are there specific places that the donor community can push on and really move this agenda forward? So I'm a big believer actually in local and national ownership of these policies. Obviously I think there is a role for the donor community otherwise it wouldn't work at the World Bank but I think the most important actors are those in local government. I mean the role of community management of health interventions and so on was mentioned and I think that's hugely important. One of the lessons that I think we can learn in Africa from for example Latin America is actually the importance of a new social contract that can come up and be formed. In Latin America after democratization took place in the mid 90s in particular. We took states that had did very little redistribution, very little, you know we had what we called truncated welfare states in Latin America and that there was pensions for people who were already well off and university education for people who were already well off but almost no redistribution, right? And with the advent of democracy after the military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile, Argentina and other places like that these things really did change and we started hearing about conditional cash transfers or early childhood development initiatives in Chile and other places like that. Those things to me are a reflection of a new kind of social contract without trying to sound too grand about it. There was a redistribution of voice, there was greater empowerment of poor people and I think as that happened the state was drawn to provide services to people who previously did not receive them and I still see some of the demonstrations in the streets that you see in places like Brazil in the last two years or Chile not so long ago as an ongoing renegotiation of that social contract as population saying look, given the taxes that we pay, we don't get services that are good enough at the bulk of the distribution. Africa is still starting in that process. Of course there's variation across the continent, it's a hugely heterogeneous continent but I believe that the sort of voice and empowerment of people at the bottom will be fundamental for improved services. We already see some of that in work that had been done around the funding of schools where you see that just making available the indication of what parts of the budget are flowing from the capital cities to certain schools. There was some quite famous work on that in Uganda. Actually empowers local communities to demand that those schools receive better services and so on and so forth. Now of course there's a role for the donor community but I think that that role is fundamentally in supporting the initiatives of people and governments at local and national level. And are you seeing that being done on the ground? I mean, are there changes in how the donor communities to approach how it's interacting with some of these countries? That's a good question. I think we see it not because of the leadership of the donor community to be completely honest but where the countries lead. So two good examples of that are countries that were mentioned earlier, Ethiopia and Rwanda which have their shortcomings in terms of the democratic nature of their governments but they have governments that are very developmental and pro-poor and where they are leading those efforts the World Bank and other donors follow. I think the places where we at the World Bank try to exercise a leadership role is in what my boss, the Vice President for Africa calls failed and forgotten states. One example is Guinea-Bissau. So we just participated in a large round table for a plaging round table for projects and interventions in Guinea-Bissau. Guinea-Bissau is one of the poorest countries in the continent. It has a long legacy of conflict and malfunctioning institutions. And there I think some of the interventions that we're engaged in are trying to help the government move in the direction of just any services to be honest. I mean this is a place where a year or two ago there was no electricity for extended periods of time and teachers were not at school and so on and so forth. So and then once there's some promotion of services going on, then extension of those services of course to the least privileged into the neediest. So there's a wide range. I mean I think what I'm saying is that in most places in the continent we follow the lead of national government, which is as it should be, in conflicts that are particularly fragile where institutions are particularly weak where there's a lot of conflict. Then I think of course the donor community can step up in a much bigger way and sometimes play that bigger role but that's no substitute for actually fixing the institutional fragility that needs to develop. Thanks. A couple of you have mentioned the sustainable development goals. So why don't we turn to that and dig in a little bit more. What opportunities are you seeing with the post-2015 agenda and the development of the sustainable development goals? Are you seeing the global community coalesce around some of the messages that we see in this report? Are your institutions engaging in that process? Or are you hopeful for what the outcome is gonna be at the end of the year? Michael, maybe we'll start with you. Sure. Yeah, we're very active in this whole process and we see a lot of opportunity. It's challenging when you have 17 goals and 169 priority targets, but that's where we are. And I would say that a couple of points. One, so what we've been pushing for are ambitious goals and I think a number of these, particularly the targets are very ambitious. I mean ending preventable child deaths by 2030. That's a good ambition. Having all kids leave school learning is a good ambition. There's lots more. So we've been pushing for ambitious targets. We've been pushing also for feasible targets. So you wanna push people, but you also have to have ways of measuring whether you got there or not. And I think a lot of the targets are at that level of granularity. There's still I think some work that's being done to try to make that uniform across all the targets. I would say that what we've really been pushing on given what this World Bank report highlighted in our report and the conversation up here is this whole notion and what is very much and seems to be very much in place, whole focus on inequality. I mean the first set of energy is really just have sheer progress and drive things down. And we've had a lot of that and now it's kind of going after pockets that have not benefited from that growth. And so we have said that we shouldn't, we've been pushing for the idea that no goals should be considered completed or achieved unless it's completed for all groups. And that does seem to, it now has been picked up. So we're quite excited that embedded in the very concept of these goals is this notion of achieving or reducing inequality. The other part which we have thought as a way to operationalize it and I think this still we would say needs further work is the idea of sort of equity stepping stone. So you don't wait till 2030 to see how you did. You put in place some incremental goals over say five years from now have you reduced the inequality between these various groups? These be this target. So you have ways of measuring as you're going towards that and therefore course correcting. So that's something a way to operationalize this emphasis on equity that we've seen. And I think there are more, the jury's out on whether that will make the final cut or not. But it's something we'd very much like to see. And I would say that just two final points. One is and it picks up on what Francisco was talking. I really do think that part of all of this really is to bring the people who are involved into the process. So you want to see sort of more representative and accountable governance. That's really solving some of these social problems is really interrelated with progress in that space. So people who are affected have a way to give voice to their concerns and demand action if you will. And the final point is what we've talked about is data. And I think there's work to be done. We don't want sort of people who are uncounted you don't know what's happening. And there's still quite a bit of that. So we have to improve the whole data system so we know where we're headed and how we're going to get there. Just to add I mean there's first of all I think equity is explicitly in the SDGs in the way that it wasn't in the MDGs which was about averages and getting going as Michael said. But I also think there's a number of other opportunities that we need to keep in mind given the topic that we're discussing here today. Firstly is that the SDGs are intended to be universal. I think how member states are gonna react to that is still being figured out. But let's assume for a moment or hope for a moment that it's truly gonna be a universal mandate. Then all of a sudden we're having a discussion not just about what's going on in Malawi or what's going on in Nigeria but we're having a discussion about what's going on in the UK or what's going on in Japan or what's going on in the US. Which I think fundamentally changes the terms of the discussion and the terms of the discourse and frankly the relationships. I think that's a very important opportunity which as I said is not yet fully worked out but if it materializes is huge. We had just yesterday the chief kind of focal point from the German government there and at least the Germans and the Dutch are saying that they're serious about the universal nature of the SDGs and that is, that's great. There are also issues in the SDGs that by their very nature are going to be universal. If you discuss violence against children and you're looking at issues of violence against children this is not unique to any society. I mean every single society in the world has issues of violence against children in different forms, in different ways but it's something that needs to be addressed and needs to be looked at universally. So I think there's a huge opportunity there in terms of both changing the way the discourse is no longer some people who are accountable and some people who are involved in the discussion without being implicated in the discussion. It's really everybody I think is engaged. Two more points. Firstly, I think the whole concept of sustainable development goals I think is in the sustainability issue bringing the whole climate change adaptation element is again going to be something that's going to be essential. So it's not just the how becomes as important as the what. So it's not just question of getting to the finish line you have to do so in a way that's sustainable. And then lastly, I think we should look at the events that are going to make up this year's calendar. So obviously in September it's very important but starting with Addis, the Addis that we're about on financing for development, the Addis-Ettelbach conference in July it's huge because that's really about domestic financing to a great extent. It's really about what can be done with budgets, what can be done with existing resources within countries again to go back to the point about country leadership and national leadership. What can be done to advance these goals? And if we can have this discussion universally and again, I think the verdict is still out that's even more exciting. Just two very small points. I think what my fellow panelists have said I have little to add. I mean one just to reiterate a point both of them already made which is I think the primary difference between the MDGs and the SDGs and where I do think it's progress is the emphasis on distribution, right? So the MDGs were all about averages in some sense and the SDGs are more explicit, considerably more explicit in looking at distribution. I don't think that's only the sort of fashion. Anna was referring to Piketty and so on earlier on. I think there's a genuine sort of recognition of the importance of that. So that's one thing. The other thing though is that I do worry a little bit. I mean having lots of targets like the 17 and so on. There's a good side to that which is the explicit acknowledgement that there is this multi-dimensionality and that there are many, many things we care about. But there's also a danger that we become sort of obsessed about accounting and these different things and see them as silos, right? And just to bring in one issue on that is that there's huge interconnection between these different targets and these different things, right? And one thing that I wanted to mention explicitly which I was thinking about when I heard Amber and Andrew present is the issue of women's education and empowerment, right? Which I think we all agree so fundamental in this context. I mean the Sahel was mentioned earlier, right? These are places where we're with fertility rates of six or seven in some cases, right? In Niger, women, a child per women. It gets very hard to think about anything with those kinds of population growth rates and fertility rates. And we know that there are issues of access to family planning and so on but the fundamental driver of fertility reductions in countries like that is women's education. Years of schooling amongst women in a number of those countries are some of the lowest in the world and they're really ridiculously low. I think I was in Mali earlier this year, I think the average schooling for women there is below two, okay, years of schooling. And I mean experience from other countries in Asia and Latin America suggests that women's education sort of goes through so many different ways. It increases labor force participation, it lowers fertility, it increases, it has intergenerational knock-on effects on girls and boys in the next generation. I think this is a huge issue for Africa. You know, I'm not much of a feminist myself but as I work on Africa I'm becoming one. I mean it's just so hugely important in Africa. The gaps are so large and I think it's an important issue. So building off of that a little bit on the education piece, I'm gonna try to wrap a few things together. One of the things that some of you commented on in this report shows is the importance of collecting data and having the knowledge and the numbers and knowing who's where and who's being reached and who isn't. But one of the flip sides of that I think we've seen in the education space is counting the number of people who are going to school has missed the quality indicators. And Andrew and Amber talked about that a little bit in the presentation that there is a difference between actually physically being in school and actually learning. And in a previous life I worked on the hill and did a lot of work on this where we used to count the number of textbooks we sent overseas or the number of teachers who were trained and we weren't counting whether the teachers were showing up for work, whether they were teaching anything, whether those textbooks were being used. So I'm wondering if you can comment a little bit on the challenges of quality but also the challenges of measuring quality and kind of how we weave all of that into kind of what the next step might be on a report like this and what that means for policy going forward. Take that first. I mean, I can't start. Just completely agree with your emphasis. I mean, it's something that, you know, I think the emphasis on years of schooling is driven by the availability of data on that which even that is problematic but is obviously much less problematic than measures of quality. In fact, there is some work that I've done some work and others have done work on measuring inequality of opportunity in education and in educational achievement using PISA data which people may know in this audience is this data that the OECD collects. It's called the program for International Student Assessment PISA and 15 year olds take these tests and they're comparable across countries and over time and space and you measure how much they've learned in some way. It's not perfect but it's a pretty good measure of educational achievement. Like the PISA data, there are other kinds of data but in Africa, one of the problems is there's very little off that. I mean, as far as I know, there isn't a single African country yet in PISA though I've just heard that there would be one joining. They have the SAC-MAC so that's one thing that we can use more a little bit. So there is an issue of collecting more data on that. I think standardized tests are a very good way of collecting data on that not so much on the production function of how that education gets done. There's different ways of doing that. There's lots of work by the Poverty Action Lab and by the IPA in Yale where they even use cameras now in classrooms and they code the way teachers spend time doing things and they say, this teacher spent too much time just kind of getting the classroom organized as all the one was actually teaching. That's after they show up, which is a first big problem. At the World Bank, I'll just mention this and conclude on this point. We have this initiative called the Service Delivery Indicators, right? The SDI, Service Delivery Indicators in Africa where which surveys schools and health centers to obtain information on things like absenteeism but also going a little bit beyond that in terms of what they do, what methods they actually use in case of clinics. In addition to the nurse was there actually were there medicines there, what these sorts of things. The picture that emerges from that and it's a pity we don't have any here today but I've used some in presentations before. The picture that emerges is very dire, very, very dire indeed. I mean, people are now going to school and that's important, access is important but surprisingly little learning actually taking place in a number of these schools as you were suggesting. So just to agree that we need more data on that and we need, it's natural in some sense that access is the first step but we need very quickly to follow that up with quality otherwise it won't mean that much. I could keep asking questions but why don't we open it to the audience and give you all an opportunity to participate. We've got some microphones that'll be coming up to you when it's your turn, please say who you are and we will take probably three questions at once and then I'll turn to the panel to answer and then we'll go back. So I think we saw a very quick hand up here in front. Thank you for a great presentation and interesting report. I actually just want to say though I was shocked that Mr. Fededa or Dr. Fededa would say I'm not a feminist. That just means someone who believes in equality for women so I hope you were joking but that was just a shocking thing to hear in an event about equality, thanks. My name is Mahmoud Ayyub with Centennial Group formerly with the World Bank. Just a quick question to the authors. In one of the graphs there was a comparison of access and HOI and it appears that in many countries like Niger for example, the gap between the two is so small and access is so little that wouldn't it, would it make sense to focus more on access rather than the question of equity at the beginning? Yeah, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My name is Rosemary Seger. I'm a president of an organization called Hope for Tomorrow. We focus on conflicts and violence and we are in the rural area. We focus on the rural area, water, infrastructure which is water and sanitation, renewable energy electricity into the rural areas looking at education. Thank you so much for your presentation. Looking at the rural areas where we need more help, more infrastructure, electricity, water and sanitation, how do you collaborate or how can you collaborate with the rural area communities especially organizations like us for the rural area to get what you are talking here. Here we are in the report reading the report but when you go on the ground, the actual ground, you don't get anything on the ground, especially people like us who are working in the rural areas. How do we work together as community, as organization and the rural area people what they are going through? So how do we make this happen other than just reading the report and that's the end of the report. The people there have another story of education, infrastructure and the other thing is how do you include people with disability, children with disability, access to education, the TAF, the LEM, the Plaint. How have you included in the report and if so, how can you support? Thank you. Thanks, hi, my name is Kevin Winsambur, retired Navy captain, I'm on the board of Finn Church Aid and one question is how as you're working in these huge problems, looking at the demographic changes of Africa forecasting out to the end of the century, what about a billion people now roughly, maybe about four billion by the end of the century, you're kind of playing catch up already. How does that factor in? To deal with here, first I will turn it over to Andrew Nambaran to address the first question about access first and then I think I'd like to also ask the panel about to build off of that, there's a conventional wisdom that you need to, that kind of getting out there to the, the hardest to reach is an impediment to growth and what you need to do is get access and then kind of go out to them later and I think these reports are showing the opposite and so it'd be interesting to delve into that a little bit more to build off that first question and let's start there and then we'll. Thank you. Thank you for the question. You know, I mean, the short answer is yes, we should be focusing on access. So one thing to remember is that while we talk a lot about equality of opportunity, what I started the presentation with is by saying that the indicator we're using is a combination of coverage access with a penalty for inequality. So these are what we call zero one indicators, you either have it or you don't. That's the way they define it, which means that access is paramount unless if you don't have it, of course, I mean if nobody has it, then there is perfect equality but that's not the equality of opportunity we want. So, and the indicator actually includes that but the point is very well taken. So which is why, you know, our messages are, you will see are not even in the last slide, the messages were actually about access to opportunity with equality, but access comes first. All right, so coming back up here, we have the question of kind of access versus equality and focusing on the hardest to reach. Collaboration with local organizations and really reaching out to the folks in the rural areas and reaching children with disabilities as well. And then the question about demographic changes, youthful just population growth. I take a stab at a couple of them. And I mean, let me start by saying, I mean I worked in places like South Sudan and Ethiopia some of my two most recent assignments and in places where you've got such a low base of access to service to begin with, I think the question of increasing access automatically has an equity impact. I mean, in a place like Ethiopia, the top quintile has different access services but the next four are essentially the same. So it's not the usual kind of stepping stone. It's basically one step and it's four steps roughly at the same level. There's issues with pastoralists and access to services in pastoralist areas of some of those countries specifically. But putting that aside, that's roughly the change in the kind of the inequity. So anything you do, even for the next rung down and the 20% out, you're having an equity impact. But that's there for those types of environments. And in many other environments, it is the more stepping stone kind of the, where if you really focus on the most poor and the most rural and the furthest, you're gonna have the biggest equity change. So I think it does really depend on context as I would say. I'd like to kind of touch upon a couple of other issues. I think again, I wanna go back to this idea of working in rural areas with local communities and local organization as being the most important, in a government led process as being the most important way forward in terms of equitable access to services. And specifically to focus on the issue and I think a couple of people have raised it of fragile context where in fragile context, in particular where central government might either be unwilling or unable to basically address these issues. The more we can have systems that are decentralized that build local capacity and the build isn't a local level that rely on civil society organization and local community engagement, including feedback loops, what I call democracy with a small D. The more successful you're gonna be in terms of creating systems that can resist shocks, that can increase access to services in a way that reduces vulnerability and increases opportunity. So I think that's all of our intent. And everyone sitting on this panel wants very much to be working in those areas and has strategies specifically designed to support work in those areas. The last point I would make is on demographics. I think one of the things that we're gonna be challenged with increasingly is working in urban areas actually. And I think a lot more of sub-Saharan Africa, but a lot more of the needs that we're gonna have to focus on is gonna be in urban areas. And a lot of our models and our thinking and the way we work, including by government in many of these countries is really focused on rural areas understandably. But I think there's gonna be a new urban reality and urban may not be Nairobi. Urban may be a town with 20,000 to 25,000 people that needs electricity, that needs access to basic services in a different way from a village. And I think we need to be working on that level of urbanism. But also just to say it's not Malthusian. I think as progress occurs, people make different choices in terms of how many children they have, which are perfectly rational. And so we're going to be in a situation where there's gonna be more opportunities than risks in the future. Maybe if I build on a couple of points, Ted made, I think there is this notion that somehow, you don't go after the hardest to reach because that'll slow down overall reductions. I'm talking about reducing child mortality. And in fact, I think what our report found is that about a fifth of the countries that were achieving above median rates of reduction in child mortality, they were also sort of on an equitable path so that no groups were being left behind, so to speak. So for the fifth of the fastest reducing child survival mortality countries reducing, they were on an equitable path. If you look at the countries, and there was probably about maybe 15 of them, 10, 15, something like that, that were reducing the sort of inequity between the groups, a majority of the ones that were having equitable reductions in child survival were also higher than median rate of reducing child mortality. So there's something, it's not necessarily the case, but it's connected in a way that going after the harder to reach is not necessarily gonna slow you down. And there's good evidence to say it'll speed you up. So I think there's a lot of rationale for that kind of focus. On the point about rural and urban, I think to Ted's point, a lot of what all of us are trying to do is extend health systems out to people that are not connected with them yet. And quite a bit of that over the last 10 years or so really is involve community health workers and most of that is out in rural areas. So a lot of the work that we say the children have done is really working with communities, working with local partners to kind of extend a certain amount of essential services out as far as it can go. And I think when you look at some of the poster child countries that have had above media, for example, Malawi. Malawi's met MDG4, but it's done it in an equitable fashion. How did they do that? Well, they focused, they had equity as an explicit target for what they were doing, but it was all about getting community health workers out to these areas and working with local partners. It wasn't about bringing everybody to hospitals and things like that. So it really, you can have a pro-poor equitable strategy to achieve the reductions, but it's about pushing these services out. Plus you have to have resources. I mean, Malawi was one of these, one of a handful of countries in Africa. There's an abuja declaration that talks about a certain level of investment in health. And Malawi also, besides it did meet this sort of investment, more than that, this investment in health, but did it in an equitable way where they tried to push it out to rural communities. I think the group that, I mean, disabled is a very good point. And I think that requires, and I think that the sustainable development goal opportunity provides a way to put a spotlight on those groups as well. I mean, it's an area that hasn't gotten enough attention. We work, I was in China not too long ago and we do a lot of work with on inclusive education in China. So I think I would agree with you. More attention needs to be given to that. So I do a few points. If you'd like, yes. Yeah, so let me actually start with the feminist one where I misspoke. I think what I was trying to say was that even if you started out without a particular concern for the equity of distribution between men and women, looking at the problems in Africa make you just realize how important women's education and empowerment are, even without any other consideration. So that's what I wanted to say about that. On access and the HOI, I do wanna say one thing about that and that is that it does, for that it does matter how you measure the things a little bit. And as Andrew and Amber pointed out, this kind of measure of inequality of opportunity is very much a basic beginning which is access to certain services, right? So when you measure inequality of opportunity in other ways, even if you just go to quality, even if you just go to the measurement of inequality of opportunity in achievement of learning or if you do it using income, then the correlation between averages and access on the one hand and equality of opportunity on the other becomes much, much weaker. And I'd like to emphasize that point, which I was making on Saturday at a similar round table to this at the Kennedy School in Cambridge, which is the following, that in fact equal access is not at all sufficient for equal opportunities. The way John Romer, which someone I think Amber put up in the beginning here, thinks of equal opportunities and many other people think of equal opportunities is that outcomes should be determined primarily by differences in effort or individual responsibility and that individual circumstances shouldn't matter. Notice that outcomes, circumstances should not matter for outcomes. Now that's saying that parental education, parental background, family background shouldn't matter for outcomes. Now we all know how enormously important family background is for outcomes, which suggests that if you wanna have policy for equal opportunities, it's not that the school should be the same. We should put more resources in the school for people with worse family background. We should be spending a lot more effort and attention. We should have the best teachers for them, not the other way around, right? So most people, and I've done and spent probably too much time working on measuring inequality of opportunity, but most of us who work on that area would see the HOI as a sort of fairly basic requirement where basic access to things. And so it may give you the impression, and as the index rightly does, I forget who asked it, I think you, sir, asked the question, right? Indeed, by these metrics, access is fundamental, but once you start thinking a little bit, being a little bit more demanding about what equity and equality of opportunity mean, then the degree of effort you have to spend on people you're not reaching becomes stronger. I wanted to make that point. The very brief point on rural areas, the point that was made about rural, again, this is a huge thing in Africa. It's impossible to overstate it, right? 60% of the population or more in Africa, on average, sub-Saharan Africa live in rural areas. In contrast to, for example, 20% in Latin America mostly, okay? 80% of the poor at our standard dollar 25 a day, very strict poverty measure. 80% of the poor work in agriculture and therefore live in rural areas. The gaps in access to services are tremendous. I just, you know, there are too many statistics, I just remember some, but I was in Zambia not long ago. Rural electrification rates in Zambia are 3%, and Zambia is not one of the poorest countries. 3% only, it's not 100% in urban areas, but it's a lot higher than 3%. So equality of opportunity or poverty reduction or any of these things in Africa has to go through the rural areas and in fact, increased productivity in agriculture, which is a huge, huge area. There's off-farm employment, there's growth in services and so on, but I think you cannot overstate the importance of agriculture in that area. On demographics, I had a few things as well, but let me not be long, just to say that I share your concern very much of the population growth rates. I think they will adjust, as was being suggested, but in some places they are adjusting very slowly and the Sahel is another point. I mean, there's a big difference between Southern Africa, not just South Africa, but Southern Africa where fertility rates are falling and the Sahel where they're not and so there are some big issues there and if you start thinking about the proportions of young people who enter the labor market, the demands on jobs are very, very substantial. So I think it's something we're all thinking about and struggling with. More questions or comments, right up here. My name is Satyakujo, I work for US Department of Labor, Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor Human Trafficking. My question though is not on forced labor or child labor, but this on what Francesco said with regards to national ownership. What we have is that African countries are consulted, let me put it that way, for lack of a better term, in terms of all these development goals. So my question is that, how do you get these African countries and governments to buy into the new SDG and the development goals? My name is Alan Fushman, Professor of Economics. I've lived in Africa for many years. Two things that seem, if these things are gonna be achieved, the financial aspect of this which nobody's really talked about, where the funds come to try to make the infrastructure that's necessary for this all to come about and to build on what the previous speaker just said, where is the political will to do this in Africa? And if there's no political will, doesn't matter whether the resources are there or if anybody wants to do this, but it will never happen. So nobody's really addressed that. So I'm curious what you folks think about that. Why don't we just take those two questions together and address political will and financing which are two sides of a similar coin at least, and political stability as well. I mean, I think we've dealt a little bit with fragile states, but I think one of the things that we saw in the Ebola crisis which impacts us as well is kind of an inability of the government to really get in and be believed and be trusted and serve the role that it needed to serve to really make an impact against the outbreak quickly enough. So how do we get all of those pieces that are not specific to the health system or the education system in place to make this work? Let me take a little stab at the political issue. And I would contrast it with the MDGs which when you go around a lot of countries in Africa they really are owned and they're important and they're used to shape national policy. That wasn't the case when they were first adopted. And a lot of the MDGs, it wasn't quite, they were put together in a back room somewhere in New York City, but pretty close. And yet they were, they eventually people bought into it and saw how they could be really useful in driving progress, focusing resources, mobilizing resources. The SDGs are really different, are coming out in a very different way. It's a much more open process of consultation. There's been a ton of consultation across the world in everywhere, different groups, online. So it's been a very much more open process. The African Union has come up with its own position on what it wants in the way of sustainable development goals. So there's been a much greater dialogue. And partly I think if you look at sort of why do we have 169 targets, that partly that's the trade-off when you get everybody into the room and start talking about what's important to people, you end up with more than just three or four things. So as we discussed earlier, that the benefit of the, where we are so far with the sustainable development goals is that there is a much more greater engagement by lots of different stakeholders. I mean development nowadays is not just about donors and national governments. It's a very changed landscape. So across that landscape you have many more people that are involved in the conversation of what should the next generation of these goals be. But particularly I think I feel reasonably confident that when you talk to African governments, they know what's going on, they're involved in it. Now the challenge is this, a lot of this conversation is taking place in New York and a lot of it is taking place in foreign ministries and perhaps other parts of the national government when you're talking particularly finance ministries and some of the line ministries who are going to be responsible for implementing these goals, they're a little further behind. So what really to your point about how do you get the ownership? I think part of what has to happen is that you have to have these conversations in New York that are taking place be also sort of implementation conversations back in capital. So health ministries and education ministries and at the provincial and local level you have a sense of trying these on for size, seeing what's important and then to the point of where the resources are going to come from. I mean that needs to be, that's partly what Addis is about because I think there's a sense that quite a bit of this could be mobilized in domestic resources, not all of it. But I do think that the SDGs are kind of being given birth in a very different way than the MBGs are and there's a lot more ownership and it's not the top-down process that the MBGs to some extent sort of, that was a little bit of the flavor of it when they first got launched. I'm just to add that Kenya has been one of the co-chairs of the Open Work Group and has been instrumental in steering the SDGs and now Namibia is very heavily involved. So there's been very heavy African involvement in the SDGs. It's been a much more open process and so from that perspective I think we're off to a good start. I think some of the complexities that are arising and they are around financing are not so much related to the SDGs because their emphasis is gonna be very heavily on domestic resources. ODA is not as important as it was 20 years ago as a driver of change. There's foreign direct investment, there's many other sources of financing that are gonna be critical. I think where the issue is really difficult and it both combines both questions is on the issue of climate change adaptation and I think SUNDAY almost was not concluded, did not reach, almost did not reach a conclusion on the issue of financing and the response, does everyone have an equal responsibility to some countries that went through a development phase that was expensive 50 or 100 years ago and are now wanting new countries coming up not to go through that same expensive phase of development, is there a responsibility to pay for a more carbon neutral, more sustainable form of development? I think those are the questions that started in SUNDAY almost led to SUNDAY not being concluded in some way, SUNDAY kicked the can down the road and I think for COP21 in Paris, the meeting on climate change in Paris in December, that's gonna be critical and I think that's where the issue of financing is gonna come up. I think for the SDGs, there is a strong realization that this needs to be financed and costed and there'll be innovative ways of doing that. On the sustainability aspect and the climate change aspect, that's where the most difficult conversation will take place. Let me just briefly take a couple of points on this. On the political will, I mean, I agree with what was said about how there's more engagement by African countries with the SDGs than there were perhaps with the MDGs and so on, but I think it's also, not to sort of have true rosy picture, we have to acknowledge that there are huge governance issues that remain and there are governments and politicians, individuals in other governments in Africa, as there are in other places that are not particularly concerned with reaching the poorest people necessarily and that have other individual objectives, right? So that remains the case. It's probably true in all regions. It's certainly true in Africa and I think, I don't know what the short-term solution to that is. The long-term solution I'm almost certain passes through, you have to have two things I always believe, the formal institutions of democracy and more educated people. Africa already has in most places, not all the formal institutions of democracy, as people get more and more educated, I think those popular pressures will come up. But we again see that in the process of this new social contract that I've been describing, Latin America. No means as though Latin America is kind of super successful in that either, but it's where I'm from and I've seen that movement and I think we're moving in that direction in many places in Africa too. On the financing issue just to say that, I mean obviously there will be a room for external financing, but there's a lot of room for domestic financing if African governments decide to tax effectively and better than they do at the moment and then to spend that money well, which is of course, it just goes back to the political will questions straight back. So I think with the natural resources, even with lower commodity prices, if the natural resources many of these countries have, tax rates are very low, there is lots of room for domestic financing once the incentives are there and then once you've got that money, you've got to spend it well, which is another huge issue. But I think those are those are again issues of governance and politics to a large extent. First one actually. Hi, my name is Dr. Noemi Voglozin. I'm an intern with a nonprofit that is called OIC International. I think I'm going to take a little bit, like two or three minutes because I'm going to tell you a little bit about my story. First of all, the first question I'm going to ask is, the title of the seminar is, do African children have an equal chance? They have, is, do African children have an equal chance compared to whom? That's the first question I'm going to ask. So a little bit about myself. I'm from Benin, West Africa. I'm not poor. My parents, I'm not poor in American terms. We are going to say that right now they are middle class, but when I was younger, my parents were really struggling. And for example, when I was in primary school, we didn't have electricity at home, but we weren't living in a rural area. We were living in a city. And we were living in Ivory Coast and I took a national exam just to studying with a light coming from a lamp post that was in front of our house because we didn't have electricity in our house, but I wasn't living in a village. Another thing is when I was going to university, I didn't have water at where I was living, but I was living near the university and the university is in the city. It's not in a rural area. Another thing is that I was lucky enough to be, I'm lucky enough to be here with you. I'm standing here with you today. And I was lucky enough to go through my studies with fellowship and assistantship. Right now, I have an engineer degree in agriculture. I have a master's degree in agriculture and I came to the US with an assistantship, a graduate research assistantship. And I went through my doctoral degrees with teaching assistantship and I got my PhD in geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. And right now, it has been a year and I've been looking for a position and I haven't been able to find a job. And it's not because I'm not smart. Each and every time I'm telling people my background, they are, wow, I'm impressed, I'm impressed, but they don't know what to do with me. They just don't know what to do with me because once they are going to tell you, oh, you are not an American, I cannot bother to sponsor you. And when I reply, they are going to tell me, oh, you are overqualified. And all of that put aside, they are going to tell me you don't have any experience. And that's the thing. We don't have the same educational system as you do in developed countries. And granted that we have everything, you give us everything in developing countries. We have the resources, we have the education, we have the water, we have the money, we have everything. Do we really have an equal chance compared to young professional, young adults from developing country? Can we really play on a level field? I'm just, from my perspective, I'm just going to tell you that African children can have an equal chance, but that we're going to have an equal chance if one, they have rich parents who are going to send them in developing country, in developed countries when they are younger and these children are going to spend all their studies in developed countries and they are going to gain the experience and they will be able to play on a level field with children from developed countries or there will be children who will be born from a parent, there will be second generation children. For example, there will be my children, there will be children who will be a second generation children because that's just the way it is. I mean, from my perspective, because I'm living it. Thank you for that. You raised a lot of important points. I think we have two more hands over here and then we'll come back and wrap up. Either order. Hi, thank you. My name's Paul Johnson. I had a question for the panel. Wanted to hear your perspectives if you had anything to add with respect to the private sector and with respect to multi-nationals expanding their operations in the healthcare space into Africa and how some are integrating with the local ministries to advance and move the needle on some of these human development issues. I just sort of want to get a general sense of if you think it's effective or if you think things can be done better or if you see some multi-nationals from some countries do things in different fashion. Just curious to hear your thoughts. Hi, I'm Nita Malik, a graduate student here but representing WASH advocates today. So my question is that earlier it was mentioned that certain gaps such as enrollment rates and certain health services have narrowed but others such as access to safe water and sanitation have not. So what can be done to promote integration among these sectors and these issues? So we discussed barriers to education and keeping the kids in school. So for example, girls when they hit puberty are dropping out of school because they don't have a safe and comfortable place to use a restroom anytime of the year, particularly after age puberty. So there you go, thank you. Great, so a number of issues raised there. We have this question that I was actually hoping to ask as well of integration. So across these various issues, water, sanitation, infrastructure, education, health, how do we make sure that we're hitting on all of those? The role of the private sector is a very important one that we haven't discussed yet. And then this question of having an equal chance kind of within the country, within the continent, within the broader international system and kind of what are we building towards and where can we, how can that trajectory be improved? I can try very quickly on equal chance compared to whom the first question that was asked. So this is another thing that came up at the Kennedy School on Saturday is this issue of national and international equality and inequality, right? So I think most of the study was actually looking at equality of opportunity within each of these countries. But of course, in the work of the World Bank on equality of opportunity, it started around 2004, 2005 with a report that actually Anna and I were both involved in which was the World Development Report on Equity and Development, which is when we started looking at these questions of equal opportunity quite seriously in the institution, of course, in academia that precedes it by a lot, but we started looking at it at that time. And in the motivation, in the beginning of that report, we actually had a story of two stories of pairs of children. And one of them was two children that grew up in the same country. But the other one was comparing a Swedish boy, a rich Swedish boy to a poor, I think it was a South African or I'm not sure, an African girl that was much poorer, okay? And the gap in the playing field internationally is just gigantic. I mean, it's already large enough here, but it's orders of magnitude larger internationally, right? So much so, and I'm gonna be nerdy for two seconds to point out that John Rawls, who is a political philosopher, who many of you may know and who wrote A Theory of Justice, which is taken to be one of the fundamental works arguing for equality within countries. In another book called Law of the Peoples, actually argues that there's, because there's no real social contract, and that's interesting for those of us in the international organizations, that he argues, because there's very little social contract in the international context, there's no world government. He argues there is no requirement of justice to promote equal opportunities from the bottom. Okay, now there are people who disagree with him, I've included, but that's the view, even from one of the parents of egalitarianism. So just to say that whatever you are struggling with, many people are struggling with, it's a huge issue. The international disparities are enormous. My former colleague, Branko Milanovic, decomposes inequality in the world into bits due to class, which he calls, which is actually any gaps within countries, and then location, which is inequality between countries. And that second part is about 80% of the overall. So just to put that in perspective, I have no answers to that. Although I will say very quickly on that, that I do believe now, and I've said this in a number of African countries, and whenever I say it, I say, look, let me take off my World Bank hat and put on my Brazilian citizens hat for a moment and tell you that, the World Bank and UNICEF and all of these things, they can help. But fundamentally, just as the Chinese, fundamentally, we will develop by our own true strings and boot strings. We've got to pull ourselves up that way. That's how everybody else did it. Of course, we have to try and make the world the international order fairer, but it's up to us to a very large extent. And one sign of maturity and development is when we as developing countries and stop blaming everybody else for what's going on. Often it's our own elites that we have to look at rather than anything else, but I'll stop that. Just a couple of quick ones. Firstly, on the issue of integration, I think the SDGs, because there's so many indicators, are gonna hopefully force us to think of platforms that can bring several of the goals and some of the indicators together. I think we need to look at health as a platform, as education as a platform, which is achieving multi-sectoral outcomes. And I remember when I was the representative of Unicef of Ethiopia meeting with the minister who said to me, the problem is you, not us. I mean, on Monday I've got your health people talking about health. On Tuesday I've got your nutrition people talking about nutrition. On Wednesday I've got your water sanitation hygiene people talking about sanitation hygiene and they all want the same community health worker to be at a training, a separate training for two weeks each on their own specific bespoke project because that's how the funding's organized. That's how the accountability of your system is organized. Well, this is our country, and we wanna integrate it. So you all get together. All of you foreign partners sit down with our ministry and let's have one training, one consolidated approach and it's gonna be a trade-off. We're gonna have less time on stunting because we're gonna have to make room for sanitation. And in a two-week training, we're not gonna have enough time for everything. We're gonna have to decide what's more important, how much time is devoted to that. That's just an example of the kind of work that we're gonna need to do because at the end of the day, the same progress is gonna be made on sanitation that's gonna be made on stunting that's gonna be made on access to basic health services. I think education is another such platform where school, there's basically three points of contact with the family when it comes to services. There's health, there's water, there's education and increasingly there's a social welfare point of contact which is I think an opportunity which is emerging increasingly in different point in Africa. And then I mean, your intervention was I thought very thought-provoking and I think your answer was equally thought-provoking. Can I just say that the bulk of my time in Africa and I've lived in Africa for 20 years has been in Kenya, my wife is Kenyan and you said you came from a middle class family, she would probably have come from what would be considered the lower middle class family. If I see the opportunity that the next generation in her family is having vis-a-vis the generation of her parents, it's just incredible. I mean, that's one country in a big continent but it's a country where there's an emerging middle class where the economy has made enormous progress where there's still huge disparities but overall it's a place where it's just not the same place as 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago. And I think there's increasingly that is Africa, not so much Central African Republic or places where those opportunities don't exist. And I think that's another message in the book. And I think it's a message I know we all know but I think that's gonna be a big part of the opportunity that exists. Just maybe a pick up on the private sector point a little bit. So, I mean, it's clear from the conversation earlier and that the private sector is a real driver for a lot of change that we're seeing taking place and the financial flows, innovation. There's just a lot of potential there in the private sector. And I think if we talked earlier about the sustainable development goals, the private sector is more in view with those than was certainly the case of the MDG. So for example, the secretary general's high level panel, he had representatives from the private sector on it. I think more work needs to be done on that but it's as we in the civil society community have been thinking about the sustainable development goals. We have been sort of having conversations with corporations and other sisters see how we can each get involved in taking this agenda forward. It's not yet clear. But I think it is, I think that we have to factor that in in the way the changes that are, the targets that have been set are gonna drive progress that the private sector's gonna be part of that. When you look at the national level, I mean, a lot of the experiences that speaking for Save It Children, that we've had a really in public private partnerships and there's, particularly in the health sector, there's, I can think of a number of them where you really have through that sort of Save It Children is able to kind of reach into communities and connect with communities. The private sector has things that they're bringing to the table and we have one Helping Babies Breathe which is really saving born children and it's a public private partnership in that respect. So that's one model. It's not the only model. I mean, I think increasingly people are talking about shared value and other ways where it can be, you can make a profit but also bring about social change or social impact investing. So I think there's a lot of different ways both for the private sector to sort of think about its involvement in taking, in a positive way in taking for the sustainable development goals. What is their particular role? And some of the round tables that we've had with business representatives to say, you know, we really think, we have to sort of take that in back into our business and think about how do we get involved in this? Is it that level? And then secondly, you know, sort of for companies to look at a lot of times it's a win-win. Then of course there's the whole sort of, what are the, sort of partly about what are the incentives that make it, that enable the private sector to play a role in advancing this agenda. And then there's sort of the whole regulatory side of things as well. So I think there's enormous potential there. Well we are, we're just about out of time. I want to close by giving you each an opportunity to say kind of a last few words and also pose this question. If I call you all up in 15 years and invite you back to have this conversation again, what are we going to be talking about? What's going to be, what's on the horizon? When we were looking at the Sustainable Development Goals 2.0 you can ignore that question if you want to but some closing comments and I'll throw that out there. Well I mean, just maybe a point that I think was made in the report but I just would underscore which is, and particularly you'd expect that from an organization like Save the Children, start early. I mean particularly if you look at a malnutrition being a very, it's almost a majority of child deaths are connected to malnutrition and that really begins with when the mother is pregnant and there's the first thousand days that makes a huge difference and if you don't tackle it then it has sort of lifelong consequences that's on the nutrition side of things. I think we certainly see with early childhood development and brain development the need for getting earlier on in the process early childhood development programs that governments can push out there because then the children, and we have some for example that one that we're working with the World Bank and the government of Mozambique on where we show really powerful results like 87% I think it is sort of cognitive improvement for kids that are going through these set of interventions so you want to get, you want to start that earlier and that's part of the way you achieve these targets it's part of the way you end these gaps so I would say to that and then the second point we talked about a little bit is how do you measure? I think that's a really, it's a good problem to have. I don't think we've done it yet. In terms of measuring learning as opposed to just counting kids in school or counting teachers in the classroom there is something called IDILA the International Development Education Learning Assessment like that so there are some tools out there perhaps still in early stages but I think it really is, as we go from averages to these in some way absolute goals I think we need to, our methodologies need to catch up so we can kind of track and note progress and then of course correct as necessary. Just a couple of final thoughts one is that perhaps we haven't discussed sufficiently but firstly a big part of our focus in terms of sustainability also needs to be on fragile context and unstable environment I mean as things currently stand no country which is fragile is actually gonna achieve the MDGs and that needs to be a big part of what we focus on and we speak about building resilience about bringing humanitarian development together I think it's particularly important to do so in places which are fragile and that's places often where we tend to operate vertically where we tend not to try to build systems or we try not to look at sustainability and those are the places that need it most and you can, I think a place like DR Congo which is actually making significant progress recently is evidence that you don't need to have a government which is a source of all solutions Bangladesh is another place where civil society I think the coalition of organizations and bodies under a norm with the framework led by the state has been able to make huge difference so there's different ways to achieve I think the finish line I think that's a big part of what we need to be looking at going ahead but secondly to say that I think there's and specifically for Sub-Saharan Africa there are huge opportunities for children and I think we really need to be optimistic about what this next 15 years is gonna be able to provide for children and I think look ahead we've said there's been all this gains and access to basic education we now need to look at quality of learning and secondary education you then also don't wanna be a situation as you ended up in the Middle East where you had a large number of youth who were educated but didn't have economic opportunities I mean it all needs to kind of fit together but overall I think a picture where we will see progress and where we need I think specifically to focus on those places which are more fragile which require that additional assistance So two quick parting thoughts on what we might talk about 15 years from now one thing that I think we will be talking about looking retrospectively that we talked a little about today is migration, international migration in particular so of course a huge amount of it is already there but if you look at the demographic trends that someone suggested earlier in Africa and Europe and the income differential is there I think it's a time bomb and we'll be looking at that it will be increasing concern the other thing I think we'll be talking about is we'll be talking about the previous 15 years which are the next 15 years now from either one of two perspectives and I think you can all guess which one of them I hope will come true but let me put both of them if you look at Branko Milanovic as I was saying earlier at his international inequality in the last 15 years or so there's some convergence between countries and that's driven primarily by China and India growing very fast some other East Asian countries but Africa's been part of that in the Africa rising period basically the last 10 to 12 years not before, before it was widely diverging so the big question is can we share this optimistic picture that I think all of us here on this panel have with lower commodity prices and some of the challenges that are coming ahead there is a coincidence whether it's a coincidence or not between high commodity prices and a highly benign external environment over the last 10 to 12 years and Africa's rise Africa now needs to be able to sustain that in what will likely be a more challenging period and I think in 15 years we will look back and either have seen Africa join with China and India as part of this convergence or if things go wrong lag further behind in ways that it did in the 70s and 80s and I think it's by no means guaranteed it's really up to all of us in the process to ensure that the more favorable outcome prevails Well, that is a very good note to end on so I want to thank my panelists Michael Tedd and Francisco also our presenters earlier Andrew and Anbar and Anna thank you all for coming a big thanks to Van Hubner from the Africa program for pulling this together and we are done thanks very much