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

Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals
producing a growing number of strategy papers that contain goals very
similar to individual MDGs, but this may also be due to chance. In addition,
we do know whether these strategy papers are taken seriously and to
what extent they are being translated into practice (Hermle 2005).
The MENA countries, for sure, will not be able to fully ignore the Millennium
process. The MENA countries have now realized that they will have
to come to terms with the discussions and international comparisons inspired
by the MDG agenda. However, the individual MENA countries are
dealing quite differently with this challenge. In essence, we can identify
two basic modes of response:
A first group of countries welcomes the MDGs, but not without emphasizing
that they have, basically always, pursued the MDGs. Their governments
announce – it might be said, already with a certain pride – that they
see no reason to modify their policies in view of the MGD agenda. This
group of countries includes above all Syria and Tunisia, but also, perhaps
to a lesser extent, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco.
In part at least, these countries are not all that wrong in arguing along
these lines. Tunisia especially can rightly claim that it has, already in the
past, achieved some noteworthy successes in MDG-relevant areas. Its
government has, for example, managed to reduce income poverty substantially
by a prudent social policy which it insisted on retaining against the
resistance of the IMF and the World Bank (Hamza 2002; UN 2003b). The
country also laid the foundation for its present, very active women’s promotion
policy in the 1960s (Morrison / Friedrich 2004). And Egypt and
Morocco, several years ago, put the measures in place that have ultimately
led to an appreciable rise in school-enrolment and literacy rates in these
two countries (PARC 2002; Royaume du Maroc 2003).
In other cases, though, the only explanation for the complacency of the
governments concerned is a deliberate failure to take cognizance of the
conditions actually given in their countries. One extreme example here is
Syria. In the introduction to its national MDG report, the Syrian government
let it be known that “Development in Syria takes place in a democratic
system which protects freedom, equality, justice and human rights.
The system was built [...] on political and economic pluralism.“ (Syrian
Arab Republic 2003, 4) Elsewhere it claims: “Syria’s development experience
is characterized by the provision of free and democratic education at
German Development Institute 111