Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) will publish a new study every February to measure the government’s progress in implementing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), president of the agency Abou Bakr El-Gendy announced.
MDGs are part of the development agenda supported by United Nations. El-Gendy said these focus on how the world needs to transform and tackle the numerous challenges facing millions of people worldwide. He said an integrated approach to sustainable development is how best to reach these goals by 2030.
At the “Sustainable Development 2030” conference on Sunday, El-Gendy said there are 17 main SDGs that Egypt has to achieve. At the United Nations general assembly in 2015, Egypt agreed to implement policies to address economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development in an integrated way. This specific method allows this progress to be monitored.
Some indicators need to be developed for monitoring and measuring the implementation, he said, adding that these methods will depend on the availability of data, and the capacity for finding the most trustworthy results of the government’s efforts to implement those targets.
A concrete national system must be built to collect data and produce indicators regularly, he said.
Minister of International Cooperation Sahar Nasr agreed that this data is of paramount importance. Without clear statistics, it will not be possible for the government to provide suitable policies, which would lead Egypt away from the targeted goals, she added.
The government must cooperate with the private sector, civil society, and development partners such as the UN, Nasr added.
Maisa Shawky, an expert in National Population Council, said that previous development plans did not consider the population aspect, explaining that almost 80% of sustainable development depends on the people.
The council is developing a strategy to deal with the soaring birth rate. At the current rate, Egypt’s population will reach 128-144 million by 2030, and will result in almost 13.2 million unemployed people by 2020, and 17 million by 2030. Further, every Egyptian will lose 30% of his share of the GDP by 2030, she noted.
Just coming out of the Assembly Hall at the UN headquarters in New York, and the excitement about the Pope’s address is palpable. He talked to leaders from around the world who are here to sign off on the new development goals that will replace the Millennium Development Goals. It was great and appropriate that the Pope spent much of his time talking about the biggest issues facing the poor.
He rightly pointed out that we need to enable the world’s neediest to escape from extreme poverty and “allow them to be dignified agents of their own destiny”. Central to this is the right to education, which the Pontiff referred to as the “basis for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.”
Apart from writing from New York, I’m also president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a think-tank that has spent the past few years analysing the new development targets, and advocating for the United Nations to make these targets more effective.
While it’s great that the Pope focused attention on how to help the poor, it is unfortunate that he did not take the opportunity to call on leaders to revisit their plans for the so-called ‘Global Goals’. While formed with the greatest of intentions, these are deeply flawed.
Copenhagen Consensus had teams of economists review the United Nations’ 169 development targets, now known as the ‘Global Goals’. These are going to direct an estimated $2.5 trillion in development spending until 2030, as well as countless trillions in national budgets, so it’s important we get them right.
One big problem, which I’ll write more about in the coming days, is that 169 targets is just too many.
When Copenhagen Consensus researchers looked at the targets in their fields (such as water and sanitation, malnutrition, or air pollution), they found wildly varying results: when put into economic terms, some would achieve very little social good and others would achieve a phenomenal amount of good.
Analysis of this research by a panel including several Nobel laureate economists established that reducing the list of development targets to just nineteen of the most important investments would generate four-times more good than trying to do all 169.
The smart policies that would really make the real biggest difference for the world’s poorest include things like boosting international trade, achieving universal access to contraception and family planning, and focusing on eradicating malnutrition.
Over the next days, world leaders are going to speak about the Global Goals and then vote them into force. There are very few days left for them to sharpen the 169 targets into something that would truly help the world’s poor the most. Over the next two days, I’ll write here from the UN General Assembly, discuss the progress that the world leaders are making, and explore in more depth which development targets would make the biggest difference to the planet.
Dr. Bjorn Lomborg directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which ranks the smartest solutions to the world’s biggest problems by cost-benefit. His new book is “The Nobel Laureates’ Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World”.
Extreme poverty – or living on less than $1.25 a day – is a continuing problem for far too many people today. In Egypt for instance, such poverty still afflicts about 1.3 million people, according to the World Bank.
It is also arguably one of the most important challenges to address because more prosperous people can afford more to eat, get better access to education and healthcare and generally live better lives. So it’s good to see that excellent progress has been made in poverty reduction in recent years. The proportion of people in developing countries living in poverty more than halved between 1990 and 2010. But with Egypt’s national standard, the number of poor has increased from 11 million people in 2000 to 20 million in 2011.
Globally, according to the World Bank, just over one billion people continue to live in poverty, although that’s down from 1.9 billion in 1990. The big question now is whether this rapid improvement can be maintained so that we can truly make poverty history.
This is the question which Professor John Gibson of the University of Waikato sets out to answer in a paper commissioned by my think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is one of more than 60 expert economists looking at a range of ambitious targets covering 18 broad themes and estimating the costs and benefits of various options. This is the most effective way for a level playing field enabling sensible choices between the large number of competing options designed to make the world a better place.
At the turn of the century the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were agreed, and great progress has been made in a range of important areas, including poverty reduction. Now 193 national governments are working at the UN to agree to a new set of global targets for the next 15 years. Since we have limited means to address all the world’s ills, the targets have to be chosen carefully to be both achievable and cost-effective.
The obvious solution is probably not to address poverty head-on but focus on another policy that could help dramatically: free trade. The costs of successfully completing the Doha round of World Trade Organization talks would generate more than 2,000 times their value in benefits for developing countries and lift 160 million out of poverty. For Egypt, this would mean $897 more per person in 2030.
However, this policy has also turned out to be very hard to implement, and Doha is languishing.
Gibson points out that already for the MDGs in 2000, a number of targets were assessed and rejected in favour of a simple one: halving the rate of absolute poverty. He argues that this kind of target is still the most sensible one.
However, any target can sound deceptively simple but measuring progress – or even setting a reliable baseline – can be fraught with difficulty. Collecting reliable statistical data is almost impossible in countries with little survey infrastructure, the very places where poverty is still a big problem. And, if we can’t measure it, we don’t know if resources are being used properly.
The best which can be done is to take figures where they are available and draw whatever broader lessons we can. This is possible for Vietnam, which has made astonishing progress in recent years. In 1993, 64% of the population were below the poverty line; by 2010 this had fallen to just 5%. The benefits are wide-ranging. Not only are people earning more and have better access for good nutrition but more prosperous people are typically better educated, live longer and can make a bigger contribution to the wider economy. We can estimate the lowest cost for taking people out of poverty as the sum of money needed to plug their poverty gap. It turns out that each dollar transferred pays back $6-9in overall benefits, both measured in increased longevity, better education and higher incomes.
This, however, assumes that money can be perfectly targeted but this is an impossible task. Some of the money will be misused and some lost, so the true payback may be reduced by half, to perhaps $4-6 for each one spent. The other important point is that the tremendous progress made in a range of East Asian countries (including Vietnam) in the recent past is due to a number of factors unlikely to come together elsewhere. This is particularly true of sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty is becoming concentrated although in the mid-1980s rates of poverty were very similar in both regions. Many East Asian countries can be thought of as states with the capacity to make institutional reforms to boost growth. There are unfortunately few African states in a similar position.
Another important factor at play in East Asia is the fact that the staple food is rice. As prosperity has increased and more wheat and meat have been eaten, rice has become cheaper for those poor who depend most on it. In African countries where there is much more dependence on wheat and maize, the demand for these grains for animal feed and biofuels pushes the price up. This doesn’t mean we should give up on other regions but we have to recognize the difficulty of maintaining the rapid rate of global poverty reduction seen over the last two decades.
Poverty is an undeniably complex issue but experience shows that plenty can be done. Free trade, for one, can boost the growth of developing economies and provide more jobs. Freer migration could also be a great way to raise individual incomes. Investing in smart programmes can help millions of people out of poverty.
Dr Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, ranking the smartest solutions to the world’s biggest problems by cost-benefit. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It. His new book is How To Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place.
With one simple policy – more free trade – we could make the world $500tr better off and lift 160m people out of extreme poverty. If there is one question we have to ask ourselves, it is: why don’t we?
In 2000, the international community agreed a set of important targets to improve the lot of the world’s poorest by 2015, the Millennium Development Goals. Many of these goals were extremely successful in vital areas such as reducing poverty and hunger, but there is still much to be done. Through the UN, world leaders are now working on the next set of targets for 2015-2030. As the world will spend $2.5tr just on development aid over that period, and countless trillions in national budgets, there are lots of contenders for these targets.
That is why my think tank, Copenhagen Consensus, has asked some 60 of the world’s top economists to look at the economic, social and environmental costs and benefits of many different targets, in areas like health, nutrition and education. And these are all important. But one issue is often missing. As argued in a new paper by professor Kym Anderson of the University of Adelaide, reducing trade barriers not only makes the world richer, it is a great enabler for reducing poverty, curtailing hunger, improving health, and restoring the environment.
Freer trade essentially means that each country can focus on doing what it does best, making all countries better off. Big strides have been made in liberalisation since the Second World War, but the latest phase – the Doha Development Agenda – seems stalled, with little hope of a resolution. This is dreadful, particularly for developing countries, because two of the main areas where agreement is elusive are agriculture and textiles, both sectors where lower wage countries in the tropics and sub-tropics have a comparative advantage.
A successful Doha round could get Africa better prices for agricultural produce and textile, which would make Africa richer. But more importantly, free trade could make Africa focus on what it does best, which would boost growth just like it has for China.
Analysis shows that there would be substantial rewards for completing the Doha round. The direct economic benefits would be a 1.1% increase in global GDP. This sounds modest. But because it would impact the entire world economy, by 2030 we would be about $1.5tr richer every year.
But open economies also grow faster. In the last 50 years, countries as diverse as South Korea, Chile and India have seen their rate of growth shoot up by 1.5% per annum on average, shortly after liberalisation. If Doha can be completed, it is estimated that the global economy will grow by an extra 0.6% for the next few decades. By 2030, such dynamic growth would make the world economy $11.5tr larger each year, leaving us 10% more resources to fix all other problems.
And a large part of the benefit will go to the developing world, which by 2030 would see its economy $7tr larger each year. On average, this increased GDP is equivalent to $1,000 more for every person in the developing world. Translated directly to Egypt, this would mean the average person could be making an extra $897 per year.
By the end of the century, free trade could leave our grandkids 20% better off, or with $100tr more every year than they would otherwise have had.
For now, powerful vested interests make it hard for politicians to compromise. The jobs that are lost from free trade are obvious and concentrated – witness Western farmers protesting losing their subsidies. But the benefits are spread out – for example, food will be a bit cheaper for everyone, and Third World farmers will see greater profits.
Yet we need to keep a sense of proportion. There are real costs from free trade in terms of workers needing retraining and the provision of unemployment benefits. These outlays will occur mostly over the next decade and will cost $100-$300bn. But the benefits will accrue for at least the next nine decades, and total $500tr in present day dollars. For every dollar spent, we will achieve more than $3,000 of benefits.
And this will have huge impacts for the world’s poor. We know that economic growth has been one of the major drivers of poverty reduction – China’s rapid growth over the past 30 years has pulled 680 million people out of poverty, the most ever achieved in human history.
Yet we still have about 1.2 billion people living in abject poverty today. With future growth, this number will likely be reduced to a still chokingly high 700 million by 2030. But if we achieve freer trade through the Doha round, the faster growth could lift an extra 160 million people out of poverty by 2030.
It is worth stepping back and realising this amazing opportunity for the world. Yes, we should help in areas like food, education, health, and the environment. But if we could just get it right on free trade, we could possibly do more good here than anywhere else – leaving the world $500tr better off, with 160 million fewer poor.
Dr Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center, ranking the smartest solutions to the world’s biggest problems by cost-benefit. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It. His new book is How To Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place.
Minister of Planning Ashraf El-Araby signed an agreement with the Italian Ambassador in Egypt Tuesday to finance a €1m social and economic development project on Egypt’s north coast (Photo courtesy of Ministry of Planning)
By Menna Zaki
Minister of Planning Ashraf El-Araby signed an agreement with the Italian Ambassador in Egypt Tuesday to finance a €1m social and economic development project on Egypt’s north coast, according to a ministry statement.
The project aims to rehabilitate and develop agricultural methods and resources in Matruh governorate, as well as establish small businesses related to cultivation.
Italian Ambassador Maurizio Massari said the project is part of a €27m cooperation framework negotiated by the European Union to develop rural parts of Fayoum, Minya and Matruh governorates.
Massari said €10m will be granted to the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation to develop the agriculture industry in Minya and Fayoum.
El-Araby also met Tuesday with Anita Nirody, resident coordinator for the United Nations, to discuss progress on the UN Development Assistance Framework, a strategic roadmap developed by Egypt and the UN to address key development issues, including poverty, democratic governance, food security, and environmental sustainability.
The framework is to be implemented during 2013-2017 and will help Egypt achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, a set of eight targets established in 2000 to galvanise global efforts to reduce poverty, and improve health and education.
UNDAF aims to restore the confidence of the citizens in the Egyptian state, according to a statement released Tuesday.
Egypt suffers from various areas of deficit including: poverty and hunger, unemployment, gender disparities, and access to improved sanitation and facilities, according to a 2010 evaluation of the country’s progress on the Millennium Development Goals. The report argues that the country’s most challenging goal is to reduce the number of people living under the poverty line.
A new report published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has listed Egypt as one of the leading countries in its efforts to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in North Africa. (AFP Photo)
A new report published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has listed Egypt as one of the leading countries in its efforts to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in North Africa. The report analysed the African continent’s progress on the seven MDG goals set forth by the UNDP, which include: efforts to halve the rate of hunger and poverty, achieving universal primary education, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, and ensuring environmental sustainability.
Egypt has accelerated or maintained its rate of progress in 11 of 20 MDG indicators accessed. The report highlighted that Egypt, Tunisia and Liberia lead Africa in the reduction of child mortality rates, having surpassed the target goal of reducing the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds. The report attributed Egypt’s success to a focus on “high-impact interventions, strengthening health systems, investing more in health and its social determinates, enhancing medical technology and improving education, child protection and economic growth”.
Although Africa as a whole has made progress on the matter, Central Africa maintains a high infant mortality rate, with 139 under-five deaths for every 1,000 births.
Egypt also ranks alongside Eritrea as the only two African countries on track to meeting the MDG goal of reducing maternal mortality rates, with Equatorial Guinea being the only African nation to have already achieved the MDG target with an 81% drop in maternal mortality rates since 1990.
Egypt has also made valiant strides in detecting and combating HIV/AIDS, Malaria and a host of other diseases such as Tuberculosis. Egypt detected 64% of Tuberculosis cases, up from 11% in 1990. It still ranks far behind countries such as Tunisia and Morocco, who have detected 90% of cases as of 2010, and outranks Sudan and Sierra Leone, detecting 50 and 32%, respectively.
Since the mid-1980s, the number of African food emergencies tripled, the report said. The UNDP says Africa faces several challenges which has kept it from moving wholly past food insecurity, which include “ineffective regional and global responses, underdeveloped agriculture, a lack of modernisation, poor land structure, chronic poverty and a lack of political focus”.
Overall, Africa’s hunger rates have dropped since 1990, but the UNDP says the situation has not greatly improved. Egypt is currently ranked fourth place by the UNDP, with a hunger index rate of less than five from a scale of 100, behind Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
In terms of poverty, the UNDP has said African nations are not reducing poverty rates fast enough to meet the 2015 MDG target. “Africa’s growth has not been job-rich, and most jobs are vulnerable,” the report said. “Over the past 10 years, Africa’s labour force added 91 million people but only 37 million jobs in wage-paying sectors.”
High levels of income, gender and rural-urban inequalities are also factors which have hampered the bridging of the growth and poverty gap on the continent.
Africa as a whole also struggles to bridge gender inequality, with wage rates remaining universally unequal. The report said women across the continent are becoming more empowered, entering primary and secondary education and holding seats in government.
The UNDP said the average percentage of seats held by women in African national parliaments is nearly 20%, taking its place as one of the highest in the world after Latin America and the Caribbean.
Egypt’s Shura council, by contrast, only has eight out of the 270 seats occupied by women, or 2.9%.
