Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals ...

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Markus Loewe
Whether and to what extent the political decision-makers in the region are
in fact committed to the MDGs continues to be uncertain (DFID 2004;
Hermle 2005). The goals may prove quite opportune for rulers of countries
that have already made good progress in implementing them. These rulers
can cite the fact that they are likely to reach most MDG within the given
timeframe, both to their own population and to the international community,
as an additional argument for the legitimacy of their regimes. The
situation is, however, different for rulers for whom pursuit of the MDGs is
bound up with major problems and high opportunity costs. If they are in
fact serious about the MDGs, they will have no choice but to spend a
higher share of government revenues to implement them. In this case the
funds may be lacking in other areas where they may be needed urgently
for power-strategic reasons. Such governments are therefore not very
likely to be interested in seeing their citizens learn all to much about the
MDG agenda and start discussing it. And they are also apt to do their best
to ensure that their citizens are not properly informed about the MDGs.
What this means is that government information policy may provide a – to
be sure vague – indication of the degree to which rulers in the region are
aware of and accept the MDGs. Whether or not these rulers are in fact interested
in informing their population on the MDG agenda is reflected not
least in how often and how exactly they refer to the agenda in their official
pronouncements and how much room they accord in them to the details of
the implementation processes in their countries.
For this reason, we have evaluated, for the purpose of this study, the official
websites of governments in the MENA region. Four countries were selected
as an example: two each from the Maghreb and the Mashriq, two
monarchies and two republics, and two countries with marked French and
with English influence. These countries are: Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and
Jordan. The assessment was based on the following criteria:
– How many sites contain the keywords “Millennium Goals”, “MDGs”,
or “Millennium Declaration”?
– How intensively are these sites dealing with the issue?
– Do they address the national implementation of the MDGs?
The results are sobering. A search with Google turned up over 400,000 hits
using the extensions “.gov.ma” for Morocco, “.nat.tn” or “.ministeres.tn” for
Tunisia, “.gov.eg” for Egypt, and “.gov.jo” for Jordan. But on all these
German Development Institute