Opinion and Position Papers by Civil Society organisations and NGOs

The centrality of the Declaration to the work of the United Nations system gave a lot of weight to the need to encourage a favourable environment within which citizens of the world could play their full role in contributing to the various targets set out in the MDGs. The goals have since elicited a wide range of views and controversial discussions both from governmental and non governmental perspectives. Various Non Governmental and Civil Society Organisations have argued that the MDGs are not ambitious enough and that at the present rate of action, the world will not meet the current goals in one hundred years, let alone by 2015. Besides the orthodox foundations permeating the MDG related macro-economic policies, various NGOs and civil societies have challenged the commitment of the international community to delivering on these goals.

• The Millennium Development Goals: A Critique from the South by Samir Amin - See attached
• Monitoring the Millennium Development Goals: A Critical Review of Progress and the Mechanisms for Measurement by INTRAC - See attached
• Millennium Development Goals, a reality check – Bangladesh Public Policy Watch 2005, Unnayan Onneshan, the Innovators - See attached
• ODM – De la palabras a los hechos – seis anos de uncumplimiento, Aliança Espanola contra la Pobreza (Spanish) - See attached
•  On the Road to 2015: Putting the MDGs in Perspective - Ana Agostino at SID - See attached

More articles at:

• EU Responsibilities towards achieving the MDGs; Civil society declaration to European Ministers: April 2004. NGOs from the different sectors of civil society underline the gap between rhetoric and practice on the part of European governments in meeting the MDGs. They call upon the EU to improve its performance in order to reach Goal 8: http://www.dochas.ie/resources02d.htm

• G8 Briefing on Meeting the MDGs. Financing development at the G8 Summit 2003: Tearfund has produced a briefing paper for the G8 summit in Evian (June 1-3 2003) on meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015: http://tilz.tearfund.org/ (Search G8)

• Inter Press Service Newsletter -- Development Deadline 2015
  Subscribe to the Inter Press Service (IPS) newsletter focused on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), linking global policy to results at the grassroots. Sign up at the IPS news site on the web. http://www.ipsnews.net/new_focus/devdeadline/
• Girls can’t wait – GCE on MDG 3. 2005 was the year that the world missed the first, and most critical of all the Millennium Development Goals – gender parity in education by 2005. Over the next decade, unless world leaders take drastic action now, unacceptably slow progress on girls’ education will account for over 10 million unnecessary child and maternal deaths, will cost poor countries as much as 3 percentage points in lost economic growth, and lead to at least 3.5 million avoidable cases of HIV/AIDS. In response to this unacknowledged emergency, this paper proposes a new action plan to get every girl in school and learning. See attached
• Underachievers. A School Report on Rich Countries’ Contribution to Universal Primary Education by 2015, GCE, September 2006. See attached
• Commission for Africa: Analysis of the final report by World Development Movement, 11 March 2005. The UK Government has been pursuing a range of policies that are aimed at binding African countries to further trade liberalization. The analysis argues that the U.K government must stop these immediately if, as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown claim, the Commission is a roadmap for action and not a publicity device. In particular, it is pointed out that the UK government should use its influence in the World Bank and the IMF to bring about an end to explicit and implicit trade policy conditionality and should say publicly that it supports lower commitments for developing countries in all WTO agreements: http://www.wdm.org.uk/campaigns/trade/index.htm
• Global Development Research Papers. The Africa database of research papers at the Global Development Network gives access to full-text research documents produced in the region and freely available online. Each paper carries a concise summary: http://www.gdnet.org/middle.php?oid=258