All talk in the aid community this month is the lead up to the Millennium Development Goals summit in New York from September 20-22. The goal of the summit it to assess general progress since the MDGs began, and consider a push toward meeting the deadline of 2015 (which most development professionals would agree is unlikely). Today’s viewpoint comes from the Guardian UK, which asks whether this summit will just be another meeting of minds to decide, yet again, we aren’t making progress and the whole concept of aid may need to be rethought.
It’s an interesting point, and certainly one I hope the summit will address. It’s not easy to suggest changing development strategies that have been in place for so many years and form such a large part of many developing countries’ economies, but maybe the changes need to be made. We’ll see on the 20th! Below, an excerpt from the Guardian article:
To know if aid is working, we need to get to know the political aspects of the specific recipient country, and the particulars of the aid modalities. In some, conditions attached to aid by donors (which have undermined productive capacity leading to less food and fewer jobs) or long term aid dependence (that has so undermined political capacity and accountability that the state is now less able than previously to deliver public goods) mean that, overall, aid may have had a negative effect on poverty reduction, despite the positive stories of change we may read about in donor annual reports. But in others aid has been managed much better, with fewer negative consequences, allowing its positive impacts to dominate – real changes in the lives of poor people.
