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

Five groups of capabilities can be distinguished:
– economic capabilities (on the basis of income and assets),
Markus Loewe
– human capabilities (health, education, and access to food, water, and
habitation),
– political capabilities (freedom, voice, influence, power),
– sociocultural capabilities (status, dignity, belongingness, cultural
identity), and
– protective capabilities (protection against risks).
The HDRs, which have been released annually since 1990, seek to measure
some of these capabilities with the Human Development Index (HDI).
The HDI is a composite indicator of prosperity that includes, for the population
of a given country, per capita income (as the key figure for economic
capabilities) and data on levels of education and health (as criteria
for human capabilities) (El Masry 2003, 472).
The disappointing balance of development in the 1980s also led to the calling,
in the early 1990s, of a number of international conferences in the UN
framework that dealt with various aspects of social and ecological development
(see Overview 2). The first of these conferences was the 1990
Summit on Education for All in Jomtien (Thailand), which was organized
by UNESCO; at it the international community defined a number of educational
goals, including an important one calling for access, for all children
– girls and boys alike – by the year 2000, to a complete course of
primary education. This conference was followed by the World Summit
for Children in 1990 in New York and the ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro
in 1992, which adopted four landmark declarations. One conference
of particular importance for what was to come was the 1995 Copenhagen
World Summit for Social Development. Among other things, the conference
adopted a 10-point Declaration on Social Development that later
formed the basis of the MDGs.
These world conferences were as such nothing really unprecedented. Earlier
decades had also experienced some international conferences that
adopted declarations of intent and commitments on various issues. What
was new, however, was (i) the large number and close sequencing of the
world summits, (ii) the detailed and binding character of the resolutions
adopted, and (iii) the high political importance attached to the conferences.
28 German Development Institute