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

Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals
meant primarily for the eyes of donors. In other words, they contain what
the donors are interested in reading.
Another typical development is that in 2004, four years after the Millennium
Summit, the Egyptian government, together with the World Bank,
presented a poverty reduction strategy which, in the 53 pages of which it
consists, not once mentions the MDGs and continues to view poverty
merely as income poverty. The nonmonetary aspects of poverty (lack of
education, health, participation, etc.) are not even addressed in the paper
(Egypt / World Bank 2004).
Much the same can be said of a World Bank Poverty Report on Morocco
(World Bank 2004g) which mentions the MDGs only in a footnote, likewise
equating poverty with income poverty.
The second group of countries includes Yemen in the Middle East and Algeria
and Mauritania in North Africa. It is certainly not by chance that two
of these countries are low-income countries and that they have prepared
PRSPs. All three countries are typified by a public discourse that is quite
transparent by regional comparison, and all three are – though for different
reasons – highly dependent on the benevolence of donors.
The countries of the second group have explicitly translated all of the
MDGs into national development goals. They furthermore differ from the
countries of the first group in that they engage in far more self-criticism. In
official communiqués and documents the governments of these countries
state relatively frankly what strategic errors and omissions they have made
in the past and what major policy changes they see as necessary. Their
strategy papers contain long lists of highly precise and very ambitious
goals, which also include the MDGs.
One particularly typical case here is Mauritania, which presented a PRSP as
early as 2001. All of the MDGs are addressed in it, although the PRSP in
some cases goes far beyond the targets set out under the MDG agenda. To
cite an example, under the PRSP, the proportion of income-poor as a percentage
of the population is set to be reduced from 57 % in 1990 to 19 % by
2015 – and not ‘only’ to 28 %, as targeted in MDG1. Furthermore, the PRSP
provides for an upper limit of 1 % of the overall population for the country’s
HIV prevalence rate. And another of its PRSP goals is to lower the illiteracy
rate to 0 % by 2015 – an objective that appears highly unrealistic in view of
today’s illiteracy rate of nearly 60 % (UNDG 2002).
German Development Institute 115