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

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Markus Loewe
ber of reasons can be responsible for the country’s insufficient progress: The
success of any country in pursuing the MDGs depends on three kinds of factors.
The first is the urgency to solve the existing problems of the country, i.e.
the dimensions of the social problems depicted by the MDG indicators. It
has already been noted in Chapter 3 that e.g. enrolment rates in primary
education are much easier to raise by a few percentage points when they
have not exceeded levels of around 50 % than in the case that nearly every
child is already enrolled in primary school.
The second factor is the country’s capacities to solve its problems, i.e. the
ability of the relevant actors within the country to take adequate measures
against these problems. These capacities are determined by the availability
of financial resources, but also by the know-how, the political creativity,
and the administrative-organizational capacities of the relevant actors.
The third factor finally is the country’s disposition or readiness to solve its
problems, i.e. the will and resolve of the relevant political decision-makers
to seek and find solutions and act (Lampert 1994, 145; Loewe 1999;
Loewe 2000a, 7; Loewe 2004c, 394).
This constellation of factors gives rise to an economic and a political dilemma.
The economic dilemma is that countries which are characterized by a very
high urgency to solve their problems are usually at the same time lacking the
capacities needed to solve these problems. Most of them are in an early phase
of development where problems are still very severe but financial, administrative
and organizational capacities to solve them are also still limited.
The political dilemma, on the other hand, is given when the main actors in a
country have the capacities to solve existing problems, but are – for whatever
reasons – not ready to do so – because, for example, they prefer to spend government
revenues for other purposes (e.g. to fill their own pockets).
If the economic dilemma is noted for a developing country, then there is
good reason to engage in DC with it. The main point of DC is to help developing
countries to escape from just this economic dilemma: to support
them in precisely the areas in which they are faced with very serious
stumbling blocks to their development, bottlenecks that they are virtually
unable to overcome on their own.
The case is a different one when a developing country is faced with the political
dilemma, when, in other words, a developing country’s government
German Development Institute