MDGs: an attitudinal change for conflict areas

At the dawn of the 21st century and new millennium, 2000, while at the United Nations Millennium Summit, 189 nations pledged to end the conditions and precipitating factors of poverty that people world-over face. The representatives of these nations defined a number of targets and indicators to mark progress and set a time-line. By 2015, everything from universal access to primary education to reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS should be accomplished according to that pledge. Together the United Nations at that summit referred to these targets as the 8 Millennium Development Goals, MDGs.Periodically, each of the governments of the 189 nations is supposed to present a candid report of progress made towards the attainment of the 8 MDGs. In the preamble to the MDG declaration, a part of the phrase read: “...(to) free men, women, and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty.” Living in extreme poverty means living from hand to mouth, without any comfort or confidence in the availability of the fundamental elements that ensure human survival. Poverty, especially in Africa is also inextricably linked to conflicts and political instability -conditions which make an easy solution equally difficult to achieve.Today, my heart goes out to the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by wars and strife all over Africa -Darfur in western Sudan, eastern Congo, northern Uganda and more recently north-eastern Congo and areas of the southern Sudan, to mention but a few. For this group of people, the continued strife remains a major hindrance to poverty reduction and ultimately human development as income is continually lost out through abandonment of economic activities -farming for one that represents a nearly 70% contribution to national economies in most African countries south of the Sahara- in some cases estimated to the tune of billions of U.S. dollars. While the implementing governments seek to appease their respective MDG-programme donors this year with politicised statistics of progress made towards the attainment of the 8 MDGs, we should also seek to ask the question, are the MDGs any relevant to the millions of human lives living in 'conflict areas' - where the population of AK-47s, machetes, and axes seems to double that of the population- a sore-thumb still among many of the participating developing nations? Given that without a sustainable resolution of these conflicts, the plight of the majority of the population remains in a precarious state and this reduces the chances of any of the MDGs being realised effectively! In my opinion, there shouldn't exist even a semblance of a dichotomy between conflict resolution in war-ravaged areas and the implementation of the MDGs, because the success of the latter is also strongly hinged on the realisation of the former. If we continue to ignore this glaring fact, we as participating nations in the MDG-framework shall continue to put our countries off target for meeting the MDGs, especially on 'elimination of poverty' and who knows, regional imbalance may even get worse! My plea is that we all take appropriate action. Alluta continua...