Missing the goals

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were always going to be a challenge to achieve for Pakistan and so it has proved. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was due to address the MDG Summit 2013 in the course of his visit to the US, but withdrew at the last minute, possibly to avoid some sharp questioning at the hands of the attendant press corps. A report released by the Commonwealth Foundation (CF) at the Summit makes bleak reading. Of 48 indicators for the MDGs, we were committed to the implementation of 37. Pakistan is on track to achieve only four of those indicators by 2015. The CF report cites a range of financial shortfalls, the global finance and banking crisis, multiple policy failures, a range of institutional weaknesses and natural disasters — principally the floods of 2010-11 — as well as failure of political will and internal conflicts. A long and doleful list.



However, as another report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) points out, despite multiple failures, many of them grave, there have been successes. The number of children out of school has reportedly halved, as has extreme poverty although both these assertions have been challenged. Some development experts point out that the previous government never published an official figure for the number living in absolute poverty, and ask how it is possible to halve a figure you never had in the first place.

The UNDP has reiterated its intention to continue supporting Pakistan in achieving the MDGs even though there is only a faint chance of it doing so. This is the right decision, because not to support in the achievement could see a rolling back of the forward movement, a regression and a loss of momentum. The current government appears committed to the MDGs in some ways but not others — education yes, gender equality no — and it needs to, in these early days of its writ, look forward, beyond 2015 and the end of the MDGs programme, and discover how those goals may become institutionalised targets for the next 15 or 20 years. All is not lost, just delayed.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 3^rd, 2013.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.