Focus on Millennium Development Goals

The International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG) has released the latest edition of its publication, Poverty in Focus.

This edition is titled The MDGs and beyond: Pro-Poor Policy in a Changing World. It’s a joint effort between IPC-IG and the Institute of Development Studies in the United Kingdom.

This new publication reviews the experience of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to date and asks what needs to be done to achieve the goals by 2015. The guest editors are Andy Sumner (Institute of Development Studies Sussex) and Claire Melamed (ActionAid) . The issue has a foreword by Lord Mark Malloch-Brown.

You can download the full publication here.

The articles in the publication assess the experience of the Millennium Development Goals to date. They look at what can be done to boost progress towards meeting the goals. They ask whether some of the goals, or the approach to meeting the goals, need to be adjusted, and they look beyond the 2015 target to ask what is needed beyond that date.

Particularly interesting is an article by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr of The New School in New York. Fukuda-Parr argues that most governments’ Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), wrongly assume that economic growth and development will trickle down to benefit the poor. She says that countries should not adopt the MDGs as inflexible targets, but should adapt them to national circumstances. Central to this is that governments should focus specifically on pro-poor economic growth and pro-poor social investments.

Important in all of this, is to ensure that the poor are empowered and able to participate in designing and implementing measures to reduce poverty, she says.