Pacific May Project A Mixed Picture: UNDP

MDGs is the new catchphrase of Peter Witham and his team at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) multi-country office in Suva. It's the acronym for Millennium Development Goals and was endorsed, as the name suggests, at the Millennium Summit convened by a special session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September, 2000.

As UNDP Resident Representative and United Nations resident coordinator in Fiji, Witham knows the uniqueness of MDGs.

Until the Millennium Summit, never before has a broad consensus brokered between the 189 nations of the world; the rich and poor, the developed and developing countries.

"There had been a lot of statements and agreements before, but it tends to be only a certain group of countries, the donor countries or the developing countries, or European countries, or the Pacific," explains Witham.

"Incidentally, most of the countries that signed up and agreed to this were at the level of heads of government and heads of state. It wasn't just an ambassador signing on instructions from Suva or Canberra. They thought it important to go there themselves to sign up."

The way the MDGs are structured is also different, Witham said. While the first seven goals concern developing nations only and touch on common issues like the environment, education, health, poverty and gender, the eighth goal links the developing and developed countries together in a form of a compact. Under this, crucial matters like fair trade, international finance systems and the responsibility of donor nations to provide more aid are addressed.

Q: Where does the Pacific stand in the pursuit of MDGs?

If you are going to get an agreement between 189 countries, inevitably it is very general. Although you have these nice broad goals, there have to be some targets that are tailored to each of these countries. Each country has got its own situation. The problems of Fiji with 800,000 people in 300 islands with real mountains and forests are quite different from the problems of Tuvalu, an atoll country with 10,000 people.

What we are doing is working with the governments now to take those MDGs and add targets and indicators which are then used for their own national planning and target setting.

This is going on at the moment with the planning ministry here in Suva where discussions are going on about how one relates each of the Fiji government's own plans to these MDGs.

Another thing that happens is that in some countries, the more developed ones, the ones that are doing better like Fiji which we regard as a middle income countries, you don't have across-the-board health problems affecting the whole population so much. You don't have across-the-board poverty affecting the whole population. You certainly don't have starvation problems. But what you do have are pockets of people who are in need. Poverty doesn't exist in Fiji but only in certain groups, either geographically (the west or east) or by types of people (sugar ones for example). So the nature of discussions in Fiji is that you can't just take one MDG for the whole of Fiji. The way you target it and the issues may be different in one part of the country than the other.

In some of the other countries like say, Solomons, there are much more generalised issues of health and education. The more developed a country gets, the better it does, the more tailored you got to be even within the country, and do what statisticians call desegregate statistics and then plan basically on the needs of each province or region. So that is what we are trying to do. We are working with a series of governments to try and relate their development plans to the MDGs.

But that's quite simple actually because you know it's very easy to relate any country's development plan to this eight very general goals. What is more of a challenge is to work with governments and say within these broad goals of health, what is your biggest health priority? What is a reasonable target? Is it going to be 1/2x, or 1/4x or whatever?

The final thing is that some countries like Fiji are already at what the MDGs declarations said the world should be at, where the target is expressed as a percentage of a population. Your education, for example, is already beyond what's hoped to be the global average of percentage of kids that finished primary school. You are way above that, you are doing much better than most. It's similar with a lot of health issues.

"Therefore, the challenge is to work with the Fiji Government and other governments who are in that happy situation and make these global targets not as a ceiling, but to act as a springboard. If you think about it, by the year 2015 when all these targets are supposed to be achieved, there are going to be some countries which are still below average. To counteract that, we need some countries to be above average like Fiji."

Q: So UNDP doesn't provide the money, but merely the expertise in the discussions you have with governments over the achievement of MDGs?

"It's both. First of all, I should say that while UNDP is taking the lead in the UN system, it is also very much the business of other UN agencies. Let me put it this way, every project we have on the ground now, whether in Fiji or any of the nine countries we cover from here, or indeed whether it's in Brazil or Congo or Jordan, must be and can very easily be related to the achievement of one of the MDGs. So there are two quite separate dimensions here, which you quite rightly spotted. One is our own project, just as we want governments' own plans to be oriented to MDGs. That's not difficult because they are so broad. But then, there is also the business which goes way beyond our projects, sitting with governments and working with them so that governments' own targets and plans are oriented to the MDGs as well."

Q: Is the UNDP in a position to monitor how countries of the Pacific are meeting their targets?

We will be in a better position by the end of 2004 because we are dealing now with two time scales. The first time scale is when all the countries signed up to this MDGs in what's called the Millennium Declarations of 2000. They have also requested Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, to report back to the 2005 General Assembly on how it's going. Kofi Annan then asked UNDP to take the lead in working with governments in preparing their national reports. So we've just started it now.

But the 2003 Human Development Report (of UNDP) gives you some pretty good indications. In that report, some 50 countries globally including some in the Pacific are identified as not likely to achieve these global targets in their own countries without some extra special interventions. "What is interesting about the 50 countries is that they are in all continents of the world. They range from landlocked countries in Central Asia to indeed some of the Pacific islands countries. They all suffer from being geographically disadvantaged in terms of trade. Clearly, if you are trying to export something out of Kiribati to Europe, you have a disadvantage to start with simply because of distance. As the UNDP director Mark Brown told the recent Pacific Islands Forum Summit in Auckland, it really all comes down to geography, geography, geography."

Q: What then is the strategy to assist these 50 countries?

"Basically, they have common problems, but the response has to be different. Let me give you just one example‹in the Solomon Islands. I'm not a doctor, let alone an epidemiologist but I have been told that 15 years ago, the malaria rate in the Solomons was reasonably under control because people were getting drugs to treat malaria, mosquito nets were being provided and other measures to stop them from being bitten. It wasn't the perfect situation but the trend was in the right direction. Then, we had the conflict and one of its effects was the halting of government health services.

"As a result, the malaria rate has gone right in the other direction, screaming up. Now, if you want to tackle mortality in the Solomon Islands and bring the figure down, clearly that has to be addressed."

Q: So the MDGs' the barometer used to check on how far each country has progressed?

I'd rather not use the word check but work with. ŒCheck' sounds like we are the policeman, we're not. But yes, working with each country, helping them adapt MDGs to their own requirements so we don't tell Fiji to have a malaria programme, that will be silly.

Maybe, we'll say to Fiji or our WHO colleagues, in particular, might say instead of focusing on malaria, we should focus on diabetes, then working with them to try and monitor how it's going. What has actually happened in some countries, not yet in the Pacific, because the Pacific is only just starting on this MDG business in the last year, is that when you publish the HD report which is a bit of a scorecard on how the countries are doing, sometimes it generates a very, very healthy public debate.

There have been some countries outside the Pacific where governments like all governments do, got itself elected on taking services to the people, on more schools, better schools, more hospitals, better hospitals. Then the HD Report comes out and they see things are not improving and then they start asking questions.

"So actually, it begins to get quite a nice level of accountability and good governance because it helps governments to judge how they are progressing both in terms of the past and the future and with regard to their neighbours. But it also helps the population judge how their governments are doing."

Q: How is the picture likely to look come December 2004?

I'm sorry if it sounds like an evasive answer, but I think it's the answer I have to give. There's not going to be one picture. We are dealing with 15 very different countries‹between Papua New Guinea with 4 million people in a country the size of Italy or California, and Niue which has only a few hundred people. And not just in terms of topography between Fiji which is a big island and Tuvalu which is a little atoll, but also in the level of development and the level of capacity and where they are now.

We ranged between Fiji which is a middle-income country, going pretty good in its social indicators to Papua New Guinea which is middle-income too, but where the social indicators aren't half as favourable. You've got Samoa which is low-income but very good social indicators, and then you've got Vanuatu which is low-income but bad social indicators.

"So how these countries measure up against this international yardstick is going to vary tremendously between them. But I think countries like Fiji and Samoa will show up pretty well. Other countries will not show up so well because they are starting much further back and there's only so much you can do in any given time."