Nye FN tall: Barnedødlighet faller, men ikke nok til å nå FNs Tusenårsmål

FN har publisert nye tall på barnedødlighet i verden. Hvis du er det minste nysgjerrig på dette temaet i verdenspolitikken, anbefaler jeg å se denne kjappe innføringsvideoen av ‘kongen av grafikk’, Hans Rosling (4.48 min – verdt det):
Konklusjonen av de nye FN tallene er dette: Fallet i barnedødlighet er ikke stort nok for å nå FNs Tusenårsmål, men det er lyspunkter:

The greatest advances were made in Northern Africa and Eastern Asia. But most striking is the progress that has been made in some of the world’s poorest countries. Against steep odds, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Liberia, Madagascar, Nepal, Timor-Leste and Turkmenistan have all reduced their under-five mortality rates by 50 per cent or more.

Her er hele tilleggsrapporten til Mål 4.

Fattigdomsbekjempelse og økonomisk vekst – ikke samme sak ifølge the Guardian

Foto: Dado Galdieri/AP

The Guardians «Poverty Matters Blog» om at fattigdomsreduksjon ikke er økonomiskvekst. Gode poeng om diversifisering av økonomien og mangel på intensiver for industrialisering.

The focus on aid effectiveness and poverty reduction, established by the millennium development goals (MDGs) and the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and Accra Agenda for Action, perpetuates a bloated aid industry that doles out millions of dollars each year to legions of contractors and NGOs to carry out projects in dozens of poor countries. But one should ask if there isn’t more to economic development than just better aid effectiveness, country ownership, donor co-ordination, and monitoring and evaluation.

In recent decades, earlier notions of development economics have been replaced with meeting the MDGs. But poverty reduction is not development. We seem to have suffered collective amnesia about the history of development, which used to be widely understood as industrialisation – in which poor countries undergo a transformative process out of primary agriculture and extractive industries into manufacturing and services industries with higher value-added over time.