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

Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals
sites we found only 143 hits for the search terms “Millennium Goals”,
“MDGs”, or “Millennium Declaration” (for Egypt 77 hits in a total of
197,000 pages; for Jordan 20 hits in 68,000 pages, for Tunisia three hits in
37,000 pages; and for Morocco 43 hits in 106,000 pages). 57 of these hits
were doubles and 14 hits referred to websites pages that no longer exist.
The remaining 72 pages (including 37 from Egypt, eight from Jordan,
three from Tunisia, and 24 from Morocco) only mention the MDGs or the
Millennium Declaration in passing. Only 22 such pages deal mainly with
the Millennium process (21 from Egypt, one from Jordan, and not one single
page from Tunisia or Morocco), and only 13 of these pages (all of
them from Egypt) deal with national development. 4
4 The Google search was conducted on 12 Dec. 2004. The search term used for Egypt and
Jordan was (MDGs OR millennium goals OR millennium declaration site:.gov.eg/jo).
For Morocco and Tunisia the corresponding term was (OMD OR ODM OR objective
millénaire OR déclaration millénaire site:.gov.ma/tn).
The search under Egypt turned up 147 hits; 29 were doubles, 11 pages were no longer
available, and 70 pages had no references to the MDGs, i.e. the terms sought, (millennium)
and (goals), simply happened to be on the same site. 16 of the pages found only
mentioned the MDGs in passing. Five appeared in connection with the World Summit
on the Information Society 2002, two were associated with the Earth Summit 2002 in
Johannesburg, and one had to do with the Millennium Summit itself.
Only 13 sites dealt with the Millennium process in Egypt itself. Nine of these sites dealt
with the 4th annual conference of the Egyptian National Council for Women on the
topic “Women and the Millennium Development Goals,” which took place in Cairo
from 13-16 March 2004. One hit was a ppt-presentation on environmentally sustainable
development (MDG7). Two sites contained speeches by Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of
the president, and one contained a press release by the Egyptian foreign ministry.
The search on Jordan turned up 29 hits, ten of which were doubles, two were no longer
available, and nine had no relevance to the MDGs (see above). Seven sites made passing
reference to the MDGs. Two of them dealt with water-management issues, four
were print versions of speeches held by the king on development in the Arab world, and
one contained a speech held by Prince Talal at the World Summit on the Information
Society 2003. Finally, one hit, from the Jordan Department of Statistics, referred to a
working group concerned with efforts to standardize statistics on development indicators
(including the MDG indicators).
The search on Tunisia turned up nine hits. Two of these pages mentioned, in passing,
the Millennium Declaration and one referred to the MDGs. None of the others made any
reference to the MDGs (see above).
Finally, the search on Morocco turned up 124 hits, 18 of them doubles. One page was
no longer available and 81 had no relevance to the MDGs. The remaining 24 pages
mentioned the MDGs only in passing. Eight of them were print versions of speeches
German Development Institute 107