Global Policy Forum

By Mark Malloch Brown

The commitment by world leaders at this month's United Nations Millennium Summit to halve global poverty and hunger, provide universal primary education and stem the spread of AIDS, malaria and other diseases by 2015 has been dismissed by some as little more than a pipe dream - nice ideas in principle but woefully unrealistic in practice.

That is wrong. These and other goals that the world signed up to are - while deliberately best-case scenarios - carefully calculated and technocratically grounded; not political balloons. The right combination of global and national policies, together with sustained political will, can make it happen.

Take the most blue-skyish goal of all - halving world poverty. There are currently 1.2 billion people living on the equivalent of less than $1 a day. And although it is true that total is largely unchanged from a decade ago, population growth disguises the fact that hundreds of millions of people have already been lifted out of poverty.

In East Asia the proportion of extremely poor has already plummeted from 28 percent to 15 percent since 1990. In south Asia the fall has been a more modest 44 percent to 40 percent. But with only relatively small improvements, progress in Asia alone - where two-thirds of the world's very poor live - will be almost sufficient to put the global target in reach.

Asia's success has been built on ambitious macroeconomic policies that have encouraged integration into the global economy, the development of a strong private sector that has created millions of jobs, well-managed public finances, and investments in education and health. In the wake of the 1997 financial crisis, that framework, which appeared threatened, has been strongly bolstered in many countries by an important new focus on improved governance and democratic accountability.

The challenge now is to help find what mix of similar policies and institutions is needed to translate those achievements elsewhere, especially sub-Saharan Africa. Currently the continent is home to just a quarter of the world's very poor. But that ratio is rising steadily, aggravated by the scourge of AIDS. To meet the global poverty reduction target annual economic growth would have to rise to more than 7 percent, much higher than past performance. But even that is still possible.

Countries like Mauritius and Botswana have already successfully followed East Asia's path and reduced poverty rates by more than 25 percent in less than a generation and there are encouraging signs of progress from Uganda to Mozambique. And now there are two democratic, economic powerhouses, Nigeria and South Africa, that have the potential to pull the whole region into a higher growth trajectory.

Another challenge to meeting the target is how to measure poverty, which has other dimensions than simply average income. Growth is not a gain if it destroys the environment, fails to engage women or drums families from secure but poor rural lives to a frightening, crime-ridden, marginal and anonymous city-slum existence.

And to briefly take another goal, reversing AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis which have together accounted for 150 million deaths since 1945 - more than six times as many people as have been killed in all armed conflicts combined. Here too, even without an AIDS vaccine or cure, new strategies can make a huge difference. Uganda and Senegal have already seen the proportion of people living with the AIDS virus start to shrink as the result of smart public policy, prevention and education campaigns that can be emulated elsewhere.

The task of the United Nations and partners like the World Bank is to build on and accelerate this progress. The UN Development Program is now seeking to play a catalytic role by shifting our focus toward advocacy to keep these issues firmly on global and national agendas while providing strategic advice and support to governments on how to get the right policies and institutions in place.

So this month's Millennium Summit was not a global day-dreamers' fantasy but based on real strategies and calculations. Nevertheless it was what in the language of management-speak might be called a ''stretch target.'' We are all, north and south, rich and poor, going to have to work together single-mindedly if we are going to reach these targets. And we should remember that even when we do halve world poverty that will leave a lot of poor. This is still a pragmatic goal, not an idealistic one.

Mark Malloch Brown is administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

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