OCTOBER 2005

Progress in the Era of the Millennium Development Goals

By Joan Holmes, President of The Hunger Project

Overview

In January, with the release of the UN Millennium Project action plan, The Hunger Project launched a new era in our work. We declared our unequivocal support for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and pledged to play a leadership role to ensure that they are achieved.

The Hunger Project is in great shape to take on this commitment. While it has almost always been the case that some aspect of The Hunger Project has required strengthening or redesigning to keep it at the cutting edge, we are now at a time when our programs and fundraising in every region of the world are strong, accurate and effective.

To date, we have taken a series of important steps to take on a leadership role for the MDGs:

• We have educated and mobilized our investor constituency on the MDGs.
• We have worked with all our country directors to re-examine, re-articulate and – in some cases – re-tool our programs to ensure they are at the cutting edge of strategic action to achieve all the MDGs.
• We have expanded our capacity for research and analysis.
• Our country directors are participating on the MDG Implementing Committees and civil society advocacy alliances in their countries.
• Through September and the UN 2005 World Summit, I have continued to participate as a member of the UN Hunger Task Force and have been invited to participate in other international forums – such as the Clinton Global Initiative – where the experience and perspective of The Hunger Project could make a contribution.

A key component of the MDGs is the imperative to scale-up action to match the scale of the problem. For the past 15 years, The Hunger Project has pioneered low-cost, large-scale, on-the-ground strategies that have proven effective at empowering people to achieve the MDGs. Our mission, therefore, compels us more than ever before to make these strategies known and discover ways to scale them up.

It continues to be sobering how little authentic appreciation the international development community has for the importance of gender. It requires massive efforts to keep gender on the agenda. Given our experience – that gender is not merely a factor in development but the primary root cause of most hunger and poverty – we will keep up the pressure. 

The 2005 World Summit

Early this year, there were high expectations for the 2005 World Summit, held at the UN from September 14-16. This entire year has been seen as a “make or break year” for the MDGs. The Secretary-General called for the Summit to produce “bold and far-reaching decisions” to “put in place the building blocks for a safer, more prosperous, and a fairer world.”

Some progress was clearly achieved in the run-up to the Summit:

• All the original EU members have now committed to reaching aid levels of 0.7% by 2015.
• Commitments were made at the G8 meeting in July for resolving debt in 18 countries.
• Preliminary steps were taken towards improving trade opportunities for poor nations.
• Bono, Bob Geldof and celebrities associated with the Millennium Campaign have raised public awareness of hunger and poverty issues to levels not seen in 20 years.

Yet much of this was overshadowed by calls for UN reform in the wake of the scandal over misappropriation of funds from the UN Oil for Food Program in Iraq. The pressure for UN reform was intensified with the appointment of John Bolton as the US ambassador to the UN. There were threats that the entire framework of the MDGs might be lost at the Summit, a step only prevented by interventions by civil society organizations including The Hunger Project.

In many ways, the Summit was disappointing but not disastrous to the MDG process. From our perspective, the three major outcomes were (a) there was no significant retreat from the 2000 Millennium Declaration, (b) President Bush publicly stated a US commitment to the MDGs for the first time, and (c) an expanded set of gender commitments, including universal access to reproductive health services, was included in the outcome document, something largely ignored in the 2000 Declaration.

The Clinton Global Initiative

In conjunction with the Summit, President Clinton organized the inaugural meeting of his new Clinton Global Initiative, to which I was pleased to be an invited guest.

As I wrote to President Clinton following the 3-day meetings, “The Clinton Global Initiative is clearly a far-reaching civil society initiative and one of the most promising ever undertaken. It has already demonstrated unprecedented success in galvanizing the private and voluntary sectors to meet global challenges.” The meetings brought together nearly 1,000 leaders from governments, foundations, corporations, NGOs and the entertainment industry.

Each participant was invited to make a specific commitment on the purpose line of the meetings to be accomplished in 2006. Consistent with my statement to the Global Board last October, I announced that my commitment is to meet the next great challenge for ending poverty in Africa by launching a national scale-up of our epicenter strategy in at least one African country.

As you may have read, another commitment announced is that the Clinton Global Initiative and the Scottish entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter are teaming up to develop a holistic, replicable strategy for African development. I have informed President Clinton that over the past 15 years we have developed such a strategy, and would be happy to share the experiences we’ve gained in this approach with his team, just as we did with Jeffrey Sachs and his team as they developed their Millennium Village concept. President Clinton’s staff has responded positively, and we have begun providing them with information.

Steps to scale-up the Epicenter Strategy in Africa

In May, I traveled to Ghana for meetings with all our country directors, with Ghana’s current and former presidents, and with Ghana’s MDG Implementation Commission.

There were three very important outcomes of these meetings.

1. It is clear that our epicenter strategy is replicable and effective at empowering people to achieve all the MDGs in their villages.
2. We have re-assessed our fundamental thinking about how scaling up will need to occur – at least for now. Our hopes had been that we could directly train government personnel to implement this strategy. It is clear that there is no political will within African governments to do this – and none visible on the horizon. At least for now – if the strategy is to scale up, we will need to take the next steps ourselves.
3. We did a much more comprehensive analysis of the costs of all components of this strategy and the human resources required. We now have a far more realistic analysis of the time and money required for national-level scale-up.

The good news is that the funds required are well within the current foreign aid budgets, particularly of the more progressive European donor nations. For example, our projections for an 8-year campaign to provide epicenters for everyone in Malawi would cost less than 2% of the aid currently allocated to Malawi. It would require a significant human resource mobilization in Malawi, but not one larger than we are confident we can manage.

As I stated above with regard to President Clinton, it is imperative that we make the success of our epicenter strategy know to a far larger audience than we have to date. We are reaching out in every way that we can to achieve this. As was the case in 2003 with the Millennium Project Hunger Task Force, there is nothing as effective as a personal visit:

• At my personal invitation, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Millennium Project, visited one of our epicenters in Ghana and publicly expressed his support for this strategy.
• In August, the new President of Malawi visited one of our epicenters – recognized its essential component of self-reliance – and stated, “It has shown us how we can rely on our own efforts to fight hunger and poverty. If the work of this project was spread to all places then hunger would reduce.”

Progress on the ground

Our credibility in terms of advocacy is based on the concrete, on-the-ground results of our strategies. Some of the important milestones in these strategies since our last meeting (which you will read about in the accompanying country reports) include:

• Progress at our first epicenter in Ethiopia
• First steps in calling forth a full-scale Hunger Project in Mozambique
• Government recognition of our first two women-owned rural banks in Ghana
• Implementation of our newly-decentralized and expanded program in 6 states of Mexico
• More than 1,000 events in celebration of the sixth annual National Girl Child Day in Bangladesh, this year focusing on the vital importance of girls’ nutrition
• The fifth annual Sarojini Naidu Prize for Best Reporting of Women and Panchayati Raj in India at a ceremony keynoted by Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro – India’s leading information technology company
• The launching of our “Aagaz Academy” in India – a new initiative for advanced training and empowerment for some of the most dynamic grassroots women leaders in India, to provide them with a stronger platform for advocacy and action

All of our program leaders and staff in every country are now grounded in the framework of the Millennium Development Goals, and we are now communicating all our strategies as effective pathways to achieve the MDGs.

Our Constituency - a more nuanced understanding of aid

When we enter each new era of The Hunger Project, it is absolutely essential that our constituency moves forward with us. At two-day trainings with the leadership of our investor constituency in January, April and June we have created a cadre of individuals educated in some depth on the MDGs and the issues surrounding their achievement.

One key objective – which we will reinforce on October 22 – is to get beyond the parameters of the current debate on aid, which could be summed up as – “more aid is good” versus “no it isn’t.”

Our investor constituency is unique in its appreciation that the principal obstacles to ending hunger and poverty are human issues, not financial issues. More aid can certainly be useful – if it can be used in ways which invest in human capabilities, particularly of women, and which promote self-reliance, rather than dependency and corruption.

Progress in Fundraising

In my role as interim director of fundraising, I’m pleased to report our results to date for this year, and our plans for the future.

As of the end of the third quarter, we have raised in cash and reliable pledges towards our global budget of $ 7,470,971, compared to $7,031,465 at this points last year – a 6% increase.

Our special high-level appeal this year is the Millennium Leadership Campaign – a campaign to raise an additional $5 million payable over the next 3 years. To date, there are 23 investors in this campaign, committing a total of $2.9 million.

We have recently launched two important fundraising initiatives that will be critical to our future in the era of the MDGs.

1. We have retained the services of a consultant, Steven Ast, to assist us in a search for a new Director of Philanthropy. Steven will be with us at our October meeting.
2. We have begun laying the groundwork for mobilizing funds from some of the more progressive European donor governments. As you know, The Hunger Project-India negotiated a 4-year, $2 million grant last year to scale-up its program, and we believe that similar partnerships should be possible in some of our other programs in 2006.

Plans for our fall event and next meetings

As you know, our Fall Event this year will be “The Hunger Project and the Millennium Development Goals: A Global Citizen’s Briefing” on October 22 at the New York Hilton.  We will hold a Policy Forum at 2pm that afternoon, featuring presentations by three of our Board members, presenting the current status of the MDGs in Africa, Asia and Latin America. At the evening gala, we will showcase The Hunger Project’s groundbreaking contributions to the achievement of the MDGs.

Our Global Board meeting will be held on the Sunday morning following these events.

Before the end of the year, we will also have a telephone conference call reviewing where we stand as we prepare for 2006, and we will set the date and time for this call in our meeting.