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Asia is set to miss many of its key targets under the poverty-alleviating Millennium Development Goals, and a shortage of funding has been the single biggest reason, a senior Asian Development Bank manager has said.
“The region faces a significant unfinished agenda,” said Bindu Lohani, the ADB’s vice president for knowledge management. Asia, he said, will miss targets on cutting infant and maternal mortality, closing gender gaps, and safeguarding the environment, while 1.7 billion people in Asia still lack proper sanitation. “There’s a lot of work to do,” he said.
Although extreme poverty has been sharply reduced in Asia, 733 million people in the region survive on $1.25 or less a day. Asked the biggest impediment to poverty alleviation, Mr Lohani told Emerging Markets the issue was money. “Financing is still a very important part,” he said. “1.7 billion still don’t have sanitation – what is difficult to make right? All you need is lots of money. It’s not rocket science.” He said that institutional constraints could be a challenge, “but if you have resources then you can also develop an institution to make it happen.”
He said that at the development of the MDGs, “the discussion was mainly about money,” and that a price tag of $625 billion was agreed upon. As the ADB, along with the United National Development Programme and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, develop new goals on sustainable development, the funding need is likely to be bigger still, particularly since climate change is expected to be added to this next round of goals. But asked what dollar number would be enough to eradicate poverty, Mr Lohani said: “I don’t think anybody knows what would be required to do the job at this point in time.”
Shamshad Akhtar, who is Executive Director of UN ESCAP, agreed that money had been a challenge but noted other problems. “One was the design of the millennium development goals. The base lines in some cases were not right; in others there was a siloed approach and we never looked at the interdependence of certain values,” such as a problem in the environment causing a further problem in health. “Governance, the rule of law, peace and security – these had not been touched upon in that generation of the MDGs.”
She is confident, though, that lessons have been learned as new sustainable development goals are developed, including in funding, where a great many countries (all but seven, she says) failed in their financial obligations to the original MDG. “Our idea is: of course you have to push for a higher level of transfer of resources” from donor countries, “but you have to look at alternative sources of finance.” That will include mobilizing domestic private sector resources, and persuading institutional investors to step in to development. “I have met some of the big institutional investors and they say they are very willing to support this, but obviously they want the policy-enabling environment and credit enhancements. Money is not an issue, and the will is there.”
Dr Akhtar spoke of the importance of addressing social inequality, partly because of the tensions it generates, but also as a matter of efficiency. “As an economist, to me, you cannot have good, sustainable, steady growth if you have income inequities. They are a dampener on growth.”
