Global Policy Forum

By Mario Osava

Women's rights activists in Brazil say the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are narrower than the objectives adopted at international conferences in the 1990s.

Instead of defending the MDGs, it would be better to fight for compliance with the commitments assumed at the global conferences in Cairo and Beijing, which were broader and better articulated with other development issues, said Ana Marí­a Soares, deputy secretary of the Feminist Health Network, which links 113 women's groups in Brazil. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, adopted action plans to promote gender equality and human rights - particularly sexual and reproductive rights - while recognising the close link between these questions and the fight against poverty.

The MDGs, adopted by the international community in 2000, "have actually narrowed the broad agenda" that arose from the earlier international conferences, and "ignore the ties between poverty, gender and reproductive health," said Sonia Correa, head of research on sexual and reproductive health and rights with DAWN (Development Alternative with Women for a New Era), an international women's group. An effort to widen that narrow focus at the next United Nations summit, scheduled for Sep. 14-16, appears to be condemned to failure because of pressure from the United States, she said.

Taking up once again some of the concepts agreed on by the international community in Cairo and Beijing would also mean confronting the opposition of Islamic governments, conservatives, the Vatican and even some Latin American countries that are closely allied with Washington, she said in an interview with IPS. The eight MDGs entail 18 specific targets to be met by 2015 in most cases. Progress is measurable by 48 different indicators. But only two goals - reduction of maternal mortality and combating the spread of AIDS - involve reproductive rights.

Last December, Steven Sinding, the director general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, remarked to IPS that because the goal of making contraception universally available was not included in the MDGs, it was much more difficult to gain access to funding. "If we're not on the list, we're not a priority," he said.

Another MDG, eliminating the gender gap in education, is relatively meaningless in Brazil, where girls and young women already outnumber boys and young men in the country's educational institutions, as in many other Latin American countries. One "pathetic show of the Brazilian government's uncritical support of the MDGs is its TV campaign urging Brazilians to 'send your girls to school!' when girls already form a majority in the classroom," Correa observed.

On the maternal health front, Brazil has not only brought down the mortality rate, but for the past two decades has been following an effective policy of comprehensive care for women, said Soares. And with respect to the AIDS epidemic, the Brazilian public health programme that provides anti-HIV drugs free of charge to all patients is internationally recognised as exemplary.

By putting the poverty reduction accent on income - the MDG target is to halve the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day, from 1990 levels - other aspects that are inextricably linked to poverty, like ethnic and racial inequalities, violence and the unequal distribution of income, as well as sexual rights, are basically ignored, said Soares.

Adding to the narrow focus and the over-simplifications involved in the MDGs was the limited participation of civil society in the September 2000 Millennium Summit in New York, where the MDGs were adopted, compared to the international conferences of the 1990s, said Correa.

For the first time since the big global conferences got underway, the Brazilian government will present a report to the U.N. General Assembly in New York that was drawn up without consulting civil society organisations, she pointed out. Brazil is "missing a chance" to promote its own development agenda, especially in areas in which it is already relatively advanced, like gender equality and reproductive health, complained the activist.

She said Brazil and other countries in Latin America should not limit their compliance to the global targets, but should create local programmes based on national realities, aimed at going beyond the MDGs. Rather than mandatory targets, the MDGs should be conceived of as a stimulus for designing national programmes, as Argentina has done in some cases, said Correa. Noting that Latin America is the region with the highest level of income inequality, she said these local efforts should take that fact into account.

Criticisms along these lines have been put forth in other regions as well. At a late August workshop in Bangladesh, Salma Khan, a member of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) Committee, told IPS that the MDGS "do not realise women's human rights as a development goal."

Thais Corral, the head of Brazil's Network for Human Development, said the MDGs accentuate the heavy concentration of efforts in Brazil's poorest regions, like the semi-arid northeast, which is home to 25 million of the country's 182 million inhabitants. Local action, she argued, can make faster progress in bringing down infant and maternal mortality and poverty rates, and bolstering school enrolment.

According to Corral, the big hurdle standing in the way of efforts aimed at fulfilling the MDGs is the fragmented nature of the programmes and the absence of an adequate institutional structure and mechanisms to ensure that the benefits reach the most marginalised populations and are translated into reality. This is an aspect that the international institutions are not handling well, and which generates enormous waste, and more costs than benefits, she commented to IPS. "It is essential to eliminate the bureaucracy and train and empower local agents," she said.

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