Launch of the 2003 Human Development Report
Taoiseach, Bono, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends
The world has a decision to make.
On the one hand, we face a development crisis, with more than a billion people languishing in absolute poverty, most of them without clean water to drink or enough food to eat, beset by diseases from HIV/AIDS to tuberculosis, lacking access to schools and healthcare, and living in an environment that by nearly every measure is rapidly degrading.
The depth of the crisis is made clear in the data being unveiled in the Human Development Report we are launching here in Dublin today. It is the first part of an unprecedented dual launch – with the second leg to take place in Maputo, Mozambique, on Thursday as part of the African Union summit.
On the other hand, we have, underpinned by more knowledge, greater resources, and, in the shape of the Millennium Development Goals, a new political consensus on the way forward -- an unprecedented opportunity to confront that crisis once and for all, paving the way for a world genuinely free of poverty.
We see the choice played out every day: 54 countries got poorer in the 1990s—largely because location, economic structure, and other handicaps kept them from overcoming their development challenges.
But we can still choose to change the world.
As this report shows through careful, rigorous analysis of current trends and a detailed exploration of what kind of levers of change – political, economic, scientific – can be pulled to accelerate progress, the MDGs are still well within reach at a global level and -- at a stretch – still achievable at national level by nearly every country.
But for most on our watch list of almost 60 “priority countries,” lack of progress is not about lack of trying to put good institutions, policies and growth in place. It is about handicaps, geographic isolation, war, closed markets, exclusion of women and a deteriorating environment undermining the economic base.
By combining our own ideas and analysis with the research of the Millennium Project, a world-wide coalition of some 350 academics, policy-makers and practitioners brought together by Professor Jeff Sachs, who is with us today, we are seeking to broaden the development debate beyond its traditional economic parameters, taking in everything from the critical need better to educate women in Asia, to improving soil fertility in Africa, to creating efficient systems of local governance in Latin America, to come up with a realistic framework to move forward on all the Goals.
As was made clear at the Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey, the primary responsibility for making this happen clearly lies with the developing countries themselves.
That means we need developing countries showing the kind of commitment to policy reform and prioritizing social needs that is embodied by President Chissano and his government in Mozambique, who have transformed what was not too long ago by some measures the poorest country in the world into a dynamic model for Africa and the wider world.
Here it is the MDGs good fortune to have coincided with a global democracy wave. As we reported last year, the number of democratic states has doubled in recent decades. That creates more stakeholders in the MDGs with the power to hold governments to account for their MDG performance – the ultimate compact.
But there was a solemn deal – a compact -- at Monterrey that put obligations on the rich world as well: donor countries would grow their investments in developing countries when developing countries did their part.
Achieving the MDGs without this side of the deal is like trying with one hand tied behind your back. Ireland has blazed a trail for other donors by growing its foreign aid at over 30% a year and pledging future increases on a similar scale, all with a clear focus on the neediest countries, especially in Africa. Further, Monterrey requires we now make rapid progress on trade and debt relief, helping break down barriers that keep developing countries out of rich markets and allow them to devote more of their own scarce resources to development priorities rather than repaying international creditors.
So through this joint launch, we want to dramatize the partnership between North and South which is required if we are to achieve these goals by 2015.
Because this Millennium Development Compact is our collective responsibility – and within our collective power -- to achieve. It can unite us all, rich and poor, North and South, developed and developing not in rhetoric, but at an extremely practical level, where we can hold each other to account for shared goals and, together, change the world.
Thank you.
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