Preparing for post-2015 global agenda amid opportunities

How time flies. Suddenly, we are roughly one year from 2015—the year for the achievement of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that the world—under the leadership of the United Nations (UN)—formulated in 2000.

The question is: 15 years after the benchmarks for the global development policy were established, will the world, especially Malawi, have met the targets set?

Globally, the consensus appears to be that while some progress may have been made, most of the objectives are unlikely to be achieved.

For Malawi, the figures so far are disturbing—you have to look really hard and up close to see any dent on poverty figures.

Relative income poverty—as measured by the poverty rate and the poverty gap—has barely moved; in fact, the two indicators have worsened if you care enough to look for the devil in the detail.

At the dawn of the new millennium in 2000, Malawi’s poverty rate—as defined by the number of people living below the poverty line of $1 per day—stood at 53.9 percent. Today that figure has improved by a disappointing 3.2 percentage points to 50.7 percent.

This is a decline of 5.9 percent against a 50 percent reduction target by next year since every country was supposed to cut poverty by half.

In other words, come next year, we were supposed to be talking about the poverty head count dropping to 26.95 percent.

Even with the slight improvement on the overall poverty rate, Malawi seems to have taken some steps backwards on the ultra-poor band.

In fact, reports by the UN and Government of Malawi show that the country’s ultra- poor population jumped from 22 per cent in 2005 to 25 per cent in 2011, an increase that almost cancels out the 3.2 percentage point drop in the headline poverty levels.

The reasons for the poorest getting poorer range from depressed prices of agricultural commodities to turmoil in Malawi’s twin ‘Fs’ of fuel and foreign currency—all of which trumped on disposable incomes.

To make matters worse, the poverty gap—the difference between the poor’s income or expenditure and the poverty line—hovers around 18.9 percent against an MDG target of eight.

The high poverty gap means, at least in the final analysis, that it is becoming increasingly expensive for government to invest in the poor to put them above the poverty line. That is a serious policy headache.

Regionally, Malawi is also lagging behind in terms of human development. According to the UN, Malawi’s Human Development Index (HDI) stood at 0.418 in 2012, which gives the country a rank of 170 out of 186 countries.

On the other hand, the HDI of sub-Saharan Africa was 0.463, according to the UN. This means that Malawi’s performance in this area is below the regional average, signalling that there is something that we are not doing right that our neighbours are excelling at.

So, where did we go wrong? What lessons can we learn and, after 2015, how do we bring down the global policy goals to the local communities where it is meant to uplift living standards?

Personally—and a lot of people have noted this problem—Malawi has excelled admirably in failing to implement its own elaborately developed plans.

From the Malawi Poverty Reduction Strategy, through the Malawi Growth Strategy, to the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS I and II), the problem has always been implementation slippages.

The lack of operationalisation is always glaring in how government fails to align the national budget to, in the current case, the MGDS—which is the national framework that localises MDGs.

The mismatch between the budget and the MGDS, which feeds into the MDGs, means that little can be achieved in meeting the global goals we voluntarily signed up to.

The problem is worse at local authority level as planning and implementation of programmes targeting rural areas—where the majority of the poor are and, therefore, the focus of MDGs—do not ‘talk’ to the MDGs.

It seems like the MDGs are only cursory references at central government level and almost completely non-existent at local level.

The result has been that the status of the poor has remained static, if not worsened. It is a sad turn of events that, I hope, the Malawi Government will ponder post-2015.

We already have an opportunity now because as the UN shapes the next global policy agenda to succeed MDGs, Malawi was selected as one of 50 countries where consultations on post-2015 are taking place to seek views that can inform the post-2015 discussion on the ‘Future We Want’.

According to UN resident coordinator Mia Seppo, the first phase of the consultations in the country were conducted in 2013 and a report that explored the issues Malawians would like to be prioritised in the Post-2015 Agenda, was produced around ‘the Future Malawians Want’.

The second stage is now looking at how Malawi can meet new global targets. One of the meetings in the second phase took place in Lilongwe this week in a collaborative effort of the local UN office, the Ministry of Local Government and the Malawi Local Government Association (Malga).

It is indeed crucial that the ongoing inclusive, participatory and bottom-up input solicitation will help fish out ways of ensuring that this time we must meet the targets. There is an opportunity this time around in that the preparatory work for the post-2015 agenda is being undertaken at a time the Peter Mutharika administration is putting in place a Civil and Public Service Reform Programme to help government serve its citizens better.

I hope that part of the reform process will help improve the operational efficiency not just of Capital Hill but also councils which, in these days of decentralisation, directly deliver MDGs to the poor, especially in rural areas.

As such, a people-centred decentralisation—both fiscal and political—with functioning local authority structures, should be a priority for the reform agenda, among other areas critical to improving service delivery, deepening economic development and alleviating poverty.

Also, the 50th Independence Anniversary mark gives us more impetus and momentum to do things differently; in a positively unusual way, of course.