• Meeting the health MDGs in fragile states

Meeting the health MDGs in fragile states

The 2007 Global Monitoring Report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) assesses the contributions of developing countries, developed countries, and international financial institutions toward meeting universally agreed development commitments. The report highlights two key thematic areas —gender equality and empowerment of women (the third MDG) and the special problems of fragile states, where extreme poverty is increasingly concentrated. The report also looks at growth, poverty reduction and financial susainability; aid, debt relief and trade; and monitoring the performances of the International Financial Institutions.

Some of the key points are:

• the choice to focus the 2007 report on the third MDG reflects a recognition by the international community that more is needed to support equality for the half of humanity disadvantaged through less access than men to rights
• fragile states—countries with particularly weak governance, institutions, and capacity—comprise 9 percent of the developing world’s population but over one-fourth of the extreme poor, representing an enormous challenge
• overall, evidence suggests that better growth is translating into declining poverty levels - for example, growth (in GDP) during the late 1990s through 2003/04 resulted in lower poverty incidence: for a sample of 19 lowincome countries
• at the same time, broad MDG trends have not changed much over the past year, with all regions off track on the child mortality goal, and some regions off track on at least some of the other goals
• girls’ enrollments in all levels of schooling have risen significantly
• in no region did the average proportion of seats held by women exceed 25 percent, at either the beginning of the period or the end
• most donors and multilateral development banks (MDBs) have recently adopted Gender Action Plans to make their gender mainstreaming policies more strategic and operationally effective
• after reaching a record level in 2005, total DAC member aid fell by about 5 percent to about just below $104 billion in 2006. These trends suggest that real aid delivery is falling well short of donor commitments

This report is also available in French and Spanish.

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