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

Middle East / North Africa and the Millennium Development Goals
The governments of the MENA countries are fully aware of the fact that
they will be unable to completely ignore the MDG agenda. Yet this leads
them to draw highly different conclusions. Countries such as e.g. Syria,
Egypt, or Jordan emphasize that they unreservedly welcome the MDG
agenda, though this is for them no reason to embark on a fundamentally new
course, since, as they claim, the MDGs, have, in essence, always been central
goals of their respective governments. In some cases they may not even be
all that wrong. Even before the Millennium Summit, Tunisia, for instance, had
made considerable progress in several MDG-relevant areas (reduction of income
poverty, improvement of gender equality, etc.), while in other areas, including
good governance, the country has made no progress whatever, even
since the summit. By comparison, there is no reason of any kind for the complacency
displayed by many other governments in the region.
Still, for some years now these countries have been drawing up a growing
number of development plans and sector strategy papers whose objectives,
though they may not explicitly refer to the MDG agenda, do coincide in
large measure with individual MDGs (especially often with the MDGs 4,
5, and 7). But whether and to what extent these documents are taken seriously
and in fact implemented remains to be answered. It is also conceivable
that these efforts are designed mainly to curry favor with donors.
The situation is different with countries such as Mauritania, Yemen, or
Algeria. These countries frankly admit that they have in the past neglected
certain MDG-relevant areas and are now obliged to make substantial corrections
in the policies they have been pursuing. Their planning documents
make explicit reference to all of the MDGs, specifying them as national
development goals. However, the actions undertaken by these countries
have lagged even further behind their own stated goals than they have
among the first group of countries named above.
Orientation of German development cooperation
German DC is positioned both geographically and sectorally in such a way
that it is able to provide important contributions to implementing the
MDGs in the MENA region. However, neither the partner countries nor
the German side are undertaking sufficient efforts to analyze and document
these contributions.
German Development Institute 13