There are two sessions on the future of the Millennium Development Goals after 2015 at Davos this year - that’s the same number of sessions given to meditation and art walks. The word ‘growth’ features in 11 of the agenda’s session headings, ‘human’ in 4 and ‘poverty’ gets no airtime at all. Yet if the World Economic Forum is ‘committed to improving the state of the world’ this critical debate should be front and centre of everything we are talking about.
We have made huge strides in delivering on the MDGs: the World Bank estimates that the number of extremely poor people in developing countries will fall from 29% in 1990 to 12% in 2015; the number of children dying before their fifth birthday of preventable causes across the world almost halved from 12 million to 6.9 million in a decade.
But the world has changed since the MDGs were first agreed: six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries are African and once developing countries like China, Brazil and India have become major figures on the world stage, while historically powerful economies now face cuts and financial uncertainty.
Save the Children recently published our report on our aspirations for this new framework, aiming at (stretch-but-doable) zero targets for absolute poverty reduction, hunger, preventable child and maternal deaths and a zero target for those without safe drinking water and sanitation. This is all possible, so to aim for any less is unconscionable.
Read more at Save the Children
