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A new report by ActionAid International asks rural people in 18 countries two crucial questions: Have the rights and freedoms of people in developing countries been enhanced in the process of realising the Millennium Development Goals? And have the burdens on the poor diminished over the past five years?
As the largest gathering of world leaders got underway on September 14, with heads of state of 189 countries meeting at the United Nations World Summit to discuss progress towards achieving the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), policy specialists, academics and civil society leaders have all called for development reforms. Everyone except the very people the MDGs were designed to help.
ActionAid International (AI), one of the world’s largest aid organisations, has found that the central element of people’s participation is lacking in all UN evaluations of progress towards the MDGs, which bear the strong imprint of a technical approach. Driven by quantitative targets and assessed through statistical surveys, the whole process of review and planning fails to put the poor at the foreground, as the agents of their own liberation from poverty.
To give these billions of people a voice, AI visited people living in poverty and asked them whether their freedoms, rights and dignity have been enhanced over the past five years.
Between June and August 2005, AI surveyed over 340,000 impoverished people living in 5,000 villages across 18 countries -- Afghanistan , Pakistan , Nepal , India , Bangladesh , Cambodia , Vietnam , Ethiopia , Senegal , Malawi , Sierra Leone , Kenya , Tanzania , Somalia , Nigeria , Rwanda , Brazil and Guatemala . People have reported from areas that face recurrent drought and flooding; where particular groups face exclusion and discrimination on grounds of gender and descent; from communities torn apart by conflict and where arduous process of reconstruction is just beginning.
The result of this extensive and pioneering survey is ‘Whose Freedom? MDGs: As If People Matter!’ in which the world’s poor speak out on the lack of progress towards meeting the MDGs.
Through their perspectives on livelihoods and income, access to basic services, quality of social infrastructure, and level of fulfilment of fundamental rights to food, water, health and education, the people surveyed highlighted the current realities in their villages and town settlements, where a single drought, one mosquito bite, and a few wageless days could mean the difference between life and death.
Astonishingly, AI found not a single case where people were aware of any feedback that had been taken from them on the performance of development schemes or the provision of services, let alone any form of consultation before or after the adoption of the Millennium Declaration, or progress on the MDGs.
Main findings of the survey:
Small and marginal farmers and agricultural labourers are on the brink of a livelihood crisis. Comprising nearly 70% of people living in extreme poverty, they face:
- An unrelenting pattern of ‘casualisation’ of work, with small and marginal farmers not being able to get enough returns from their patches of land.
- Hunger and starvation, with a large number of villages reporting that most families skip meals to make ends meet. People from 24% of the villages report hunger deaths, and people from 64% of the villages report that they are forced to skip meals and go hungry, either regularly or during particular seasons.
- Non-availability of work and opportunities to earn a living -- 83% of villages report that work was not available regularly when needed. In 50% of the villages, and for the majority of smallholder farmers/agricultural workers, work is available for less than half the month, with wage rates around the minimum levels.
- Inadequate safety nets in the form of social protection systems; services minimal in their spread and effectiveness. Forty-seven per cent of villages/locations had no access to any service, in any season. Where present, people reported that the services were minimal and did not reach out to more than 20% of eligible families. Where cash is given, the amounts are too low to cover even a few days of food provisions.
- Infrastructure for social protection is so weak that in only 21% of the villages is there some form of public distribution system for subsidised food, and facilities for food aid in another 8%. In times of drought, only 15% of the villages that need it have cash/food for work. Only 7% of the villages have their own grain banks.
- In none of the countries surveyed were rights to food, water, shelter, employment/work or health outlined as rights guaranteed by the government and which citizens could claim.
Women face increasing levels of discrimination and deprivation in these conditions:
- Women do not own land in 49% of the villages. In villages where they do, women are recorded as owning land in fewer than 30% of cases, and most of the time the land is held in co-ownership with men.
- Labour and work availability for women is substantially lower than it is for men. In 47% of the villages, women get work for less than 10 days in a month. Worse, women face large wage discriminations -- in 33% of the villages women get only half of what men get as wages.
- In 77% of the villages, women-headed households get no support or protection from the government. Where they do, in a majority of cases coverage is less than 30% of those who need it.
- Intensification of work burden and responsibility, with poverty, disease, privatisation and the failure of the state to deliver, leave women with very few opportunities to do anything but render care and support to the family. Women reported increased work burdens, working much more than men.
- Strong reports of violence against women from all areas.
While people consider education to be an important service, the AI report highlights concerns about the trade-off people have to make for education and problems connected with availability, access and affordability of education.
- Low level of satisfaction with the education services -- both the quality of teaching aids and school infrastructure, and very marginal coverage of the school meals programme.
- In 50% of the villages people mentioned they were dissatisfied with the education services.
- Unaffordability of education and high dropout rate, given the cost of education and the potential loss of earnings from children. Groups from 56% of the villages reported that education was not affordable given the costs incurred in one form or another.
- People from 71% of the villages reported that children in their villages work for wages.
- Only 31% of the areas reported the existence of any form of school meals programme.
- In nearly 87% of the villages there were girls of school-going age who had not enrolled.
- Sixty per cent of the villages reported that the schools their girls go to do not have toilets for girls.
- Discrimination that girls and children from marginalised groups such as dalits and minorities face in education exacerbates gender disparities.
Regarding health and drinking water, the important concerns are access to and affordability of health services.
- For a large majority of poor people who depend on public health facilities, there is the strong view that health services are becoming unaffordable -- 80% of people’s groups mentioned that health services were too costly for them.
- Distances to health centres and availability of trained personnel make access difficult -- 77% of the villages did not have nearby health centres. In 50% of the villages people had to walk between three and ten kilometres to get to a health post.
- Increasing costs of medicines and gradual withdrawal of state support have made health centres more like referral centres than places of cure -- 76% of the villages report that medicines are not available at health centres.
- Access to clean drinking water is limited, with 57% of the villages mentioning concerns about its availability; the concerns range from scant availability to drought-like conditions.
Overall, poor people reported that in the past five years they have remained where they were, or are even worse off in terms of their development.
The AI report found that the main reasons for the slow and patchy progress towards the MDGs are that while the Millennium Declaration sets out an agenda for securing rights for all humanity as a means to achieving the desired objectives, a conspicuous lack of ambition runs through the MDGs and the United Nations Millennium Project (UNMP).
Also, the human rights dimension has been insufficiently highlighted in both the MDGs and the UNMP. Devoid of a strong human rights agenda, the MDGs and UNMP fail to place people acting for themselves at their centre.
Furthermore, already weak governments and their structures are hamstrung by policies imposed from outside that undermine the state’s ability to deliver services and meet people’s demands. The failure of national governments to build national strategies and ownership of the process, as well as accountability for the same, makes the entire MDGs endeavour more like an act of charity; a mission to be carried out by a few on behalf of the poor.
Given these findings, the ActionAid report concludes with a 12-point charter for action to reclaim the human rights aspect of the Millennium Development Goals:
- Restoration of human rights debate to the central position they deserve, instead of focusing on counting poor people and their income.
- Mechanisms instituting social and economic rights such as the right to food, employment, shelter, water, health, education, and enabling the poor to claim them, should be an irreducible commitment of governments. This would be the basic requirement for developing country governments to take on the welfare and developmental role that they have proclaimed but rarely lived up to.
- As long as women’s rights are denied, the human rights discourse will remain unfocused and the accountability of governments, a theoretical proposition. Women’s rights must be not just protected, but expanded to making consequential decisions of life, reproduction, livelihood, peace and security.
- Governments must acknowledge that the targets on education and health have not been met. It is only from this acknowledgement that the effort can be redirected, so that future years can bring a better record of people’s participation, which alone can ensure the fulfilment of the millennium goals.
- Privatisation as a viable route to meeting people’s needs in education and health, and other basic services such as water, have to be rejected as a policy alternative in poor countries.
- Substantially increase investments in agriculture. With much of the world’s poor being dependent on agriculture, little progress in the struggle against poverty can be achieved without this. Nobody should be forced out of agriculture into industry and services through the insidious play of market forces. This would require land reforms and the institution of the right to food and work, along with the protection and promotion of women’s rights of access and control over land, seeds and water.
- Aid is not the only solution to the poverty challenges faced by governments and the poor. Nor is it even the principal one. Aid has to be seen as rightful restitution rather than altruism. Thus the call for donors to meet their committed target of 0.7% of national income as aid. Aid must be allocated according to poverty needs, explicitly for supporting the agenda of fighting poverty rather than meeting the strategic, political, commercial or political objectives of the donor. Aid as an instrument of meeting the MDGs will enjoy little credibility unless mutual accountability between donor and recipient is enforced.
- Additionally, efforts should be made to go beyond the ‘aid paradigm’. This requires the cancellation of all debts of the world’s poorest countries and for low and middle-income countries. All debts that could be deemed ‘illegitimate’, after account is taken of repayment adjusted for currency depreciation and interest rate effects, should be written off.
- ‘Trade justice’ must mean the reorientation of policies to ensure that trade supports development and gender equity. The call on trade justice includes a notion of the Right to Protect, where developing countries, in whatever trade negotiations, have the right to protect smallholders’ agriculture and food security. It should not, under any circumstances, become a vehicle for forced liberalisation and privatisation of services and resources. An end to the dumping of agricultural products by rich nations and a mechanism to handle the issue of commodity prices are called for.
- Sustained and substantial investments in public health infrastructure and national health systems in developing countries. This should include drug procurement and distribution systems, and human resources.
- Ensure that the full resources needed for prevention, treatment, care and support of affected people; elimination of stigma and discrimination; enhanced access to affordable medicines; and reduced vulnerability of affected persons, in particular women, girls, orphaned children, caregivers and elderly persons, are made available as soon as possible. Both donor government and national governments of highly affected countries must play their part to reduce the unfair burden on poor communities and families.
- Militarisation and the cult of violence as a remedy for conflicts induced by difficulties of life and livelihoods, should be firmly rejected. Advocacy for the poor, especially by multilateral institutions, has not worked very well so far and there is no reason to believe that it will in future. Rather than pitying the poor, it is necessary to support a process and a strategy where the poor are participants in the process of their development, and where they will mould their own destiny
InfoChange News and Features, September 2005
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