Week in review

Hello,
With an explosion of activity around the world this week we are delighted to share a very diverse Week in Review with you. This week’s highlights include issues of inequality, the Olympics and the post 2015 agenda.

On the MDGs

Ban Ki-moon names panel to lead global development agenda post-2015
Ban Ki-Moon has asked 26 members of a post 2015 Millennium Development Goal panel to 'prepare a bold yet practical' global development agenda to follow the MDGs. Chairing the panel is UK prime minister David Cameron, Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, of Indonesia.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on the Sustainable Development Goals

Report release:

A report released this week by the World Bank has emphasized the importance of circumstances at birth as the key drivers of inequality in South Africa. The report uses the Human Opportunity Index to analyse the inequality of opportunities for South African children compared to their peers in other middle-income countries.

Read more and download the full report: Economic Update South Africa: Focus on Inequality of Opportunity

Number crunch:
The richest 10% of South Africans account for 58% of the nation's income, while the bottom 10% accounts for 0.5%.
Source: Economic Update South Africa: Focus on Inequality of Opportunity

The Olympics and Gender Equality
Sexing the games (The Economist 31.07.2012)
The Economist released a new chart showing women’s participation in the Olympics since
1896. Sexing the Games shows that women first competed in the Olympics in 1900; in the 2012 London Olympics there are 131 events for women compared with 163 for men.
See more and contribute to Wikigender’s special focus: The London Olympics through a gender lens

That’s all from us this week, we hope to see you again next week for another week in review. Until then, best of luck to all the athletes competing in the 2012 London Olympics.

Yours in Progress,
Philippa Lysaght

Have we failed children? The global response to HIV

At the London Summit on Family Planning last month a strategy to reduce the further transmission of HIV was discussed, which included the following:

• Integrating family planning, sexual and reproductive health and rights,
• HIV and prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT)
• programs to achieve women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (UNAIDS, 2012b)

This importance of this strategy was reiterated by the head of USAID, Rajiv Shah, at the International Aids Conference in Washington last week where he expressed the importance of health systems and integration within programmes to address issues threatening child well-being and survival as opposed to a focus on single diseases (the Guardian, 2012).

In terms of children and HIV, an integrated approach combining HIV testing and access to treatment within family planning, sexual health and maternal health programmes, has the potential to increase the early detection of HIV in pregnant women and young children, reducing the risk of transmission of HIV from mother to child, thus increasing the likelihood of child survival.

Such a strategy is necessary, despite new infections of HIV amongst children declining by 10% in 2011, on a daily basis around 1,000 children continue to be infected with HIV (the Globe and Mail, 2012). In 2011 an estimated 330,000 babies were infected during childbirth or breastfeeding, despite medications being available to prevent this since the mid 90s and in 2010 approximately 250,000 children aged 15 years or less died of AIDS related causes (UNAIDSa, 2012).

At the Conference Mr Philip O’Brien, Executive Vice-President of the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric AIDS Foundation asked the pertinent question ‘Have we failed children?’ (the Globe and Mail, 2012).  It wouldn’t be too dramatic to say that yes we have, and that the failure is twofold, firstly because HIV continues to be transmitted from mothers to children and secondly because many children living with HIV have no access to treatment. 

In answering the question himself, Mr O’Brien stated, ‘If not a failure, the least you can say is that we have a lot of work left to do’, and indeed we do. Despite the cost of antiretroviral drugs dropping from around $10,000 to $200 in the space of 16 years (the Economist, 2012), only an estimated one in four children living with HIV receives treatment worldwide. The majority of these children will die before the age of two if they don’t receive treatment due to their underdeveloped immune systems (the Globe and Mail, 2012).

The resources exist as does a collective desire to bring about change, however Mr O’Brien states that it is connecting the dots between identifying those who need these resources and actually getting them to them that is the challenge (the Globe and Mail, 2012).  A more integral approach to women’s health and its links to that of their children could help to achieve this, contributing to the strong progress made to date, potentially surpass the UNAIDS Global Plan, target 1 to “reduce the number of new childhood HIV infections by 90%”.

Hannah Chadwick

Wikichild Coordinator

The Economist, Aim for victory, July 28-August 3 2012

The Global and Mail, ‘We have a lot of work left to do’: Child AIDS advocate, 27 July 2012,  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health/we-have-a-lot-of-work-left-to-do-child-aids-advocate/article4446468/

Global Fund, Summit on family planning stresses on linkages with HIV services, 17 July 2012, http://www.zero-hiv.dreamhosters.com/summit-on-family-planning-stresses-on-linkages-with-hiv-services/

 

The Guardian, Rajiv Shah of USAID sees the way ahead on Aids and global health - but where is Europe?, Sarah Boseley’s blog, 30.07.2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/sarah-boseley-global-health/2012/jul/30/hiv-infection-obama-administration

Save the Children, 2012, Every Woman’s Right: How family planning saves children’s lives

 

UNAIDS, 2012a, Believe it do it: Get the facts, www.unaids.org/believeitdoit/get-the-facts.html

 

UNAIDS 2012b, Summit on family planning stresses on linkages with HIV services, 17 July 2012, http://www.zero-hiv.dreamhosters.com/summit-on-family-planning-stresses-on-linkages-with-hiv-services/

Olympic super humans and the epidemic of child obesity

From July 26 until August 12, the world’s attention will be turned to London for the 2012 Olympic Games. Images of fit and healthy individuals will be blasted into our homes by way of the world’s media and many of us will spend the duration of the Games in awe of these super human individuals whose physical and mental strength is quite beyond comprehension. Whilst these super humans provide good role models for us adults, they provide even better ones for children. They also have the potential to play a key role in addressing one of the world’s most widespread epidemics - child obesity.

Like the Olympics, childhood obesity is of interest to all countries as in recent years, this global epidemic has escalated with trends for overweight and obesity increasing in both developed and developing countries (Flynn McNeill Maloff et al, 2006) and as Jamie Oliver says in his 2011 TED talk, ‘We have an awful, awful reality right now’.

• Approximately 42 million children under five were estimated to be overweight or obese in 2010, almost 35 million of whom live in developing countries (NOO, 2012).
• In Mexico 1 in 3 children is overweight (Malkin E, 2011) and in Brazil the rate of overweight and obese children increased from 4% in the 1980s to 14% in the 1990s.
• In the United States, child and adolescent obesity levels nearly tripled between the early 1980’s and the 2000’s and in Canada, levels in boys alone increased from 11-30% from the 1980‘s to the 90’s (Flynn McNeill Maloff et al, 2006).

For children obesity can have emotional and psychological impacts and lead to life threatening conditions including diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure among others. A 2008 study found that obese children had prematurely aged neck arteries which were more typical of a 45 year old as opposed to someone their own age (CTV, 2008). Caused by poor diet and physical inactivity, childhood obesity is fuelled by environmental and in some cases genetic factors with obesity in parents posing the greatest risk factor to children (Cole, 2006).

These figures are concerning, not only for the long term impacts that the persistence of this epidemic will have on the health of the world’s population and ultimately their productivity, but also because of the speed with which it is growing. The OECD’s Better Life Index reports that in 21 of the 34 OECD countries, more than 50% of the adult population is overweight or obese and that over the past 20 years rates of obesity have more than doubled in these countries (OECD, 2012).

Many countries have taken action. Starting in 2006, the UK which has one of the highest rates among European countries, introduced new nutritional guidelines to drive improvements in child health and reduce child obesity. New legislation was drawn up on the amount of junk food allowed to be sold in school canteens and there has been a rise in the popularity of traditional school dinners, which now meeting nutritional standards ensure children receive 1 balanced meal per day (Paton, 2010). Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has been a frontline campaigner for this change as he discusses in the aforementioned TED Talk.

The implications of this growing epidemic are alarming. In the context of the upcoming Olympic Games, governments’ worldwide should take the opportunity to acknowledge the gravity of child obesity which affects an estimated 10% of children globally (Bessesen, 2008). They should leverage off the Olympic super human role models and reignite efforts to address childhood obesity to give children a fair chance in life, right from the beginning.

Bessesen Dh 2008, Update on obesity, J.Clin. Endocrinol. Metab, 93 (6):2027-34

Cole T 2006, Early Causes of Childhood Obesity and Implications for Prevention, http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/14548/1/14548.pdf, [Accessed 10.07.2012]

CTV, 2008, Obese kids have arteries of 45-year-olds: study, http://www.ctvnews.ca/obese-kids-have-arteries-of-45-year-olds-study-1.341919, 11 November 2008, [Accessed 10.07.2012]

Flynn MA, McNeil DR, Maloff B, et al 2006, Reducing obesity and related chronic disease risk in children and youth: a synthesis of evidence with 'best practice' recommendations, Obes Rev 7 (Suppl 1): 7–66, (February 2006), [Accessed 10.07.2012]

Malkin E 2011, Mexico Puts Its Children on a Diet, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/americas/14mexico.html, NY Times 13 March 2011, [Accessed 10.07.2012]

National Obesity Observatory 2012, International Prevalence, http://www.noo.org.uk/NOO_about_obesity/child_obesity/international, [Accessed 10.07.2012]

OECD, 2012, Better Life Index, Health, http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/health/

Paton G, Jamie Oliver Inspires School Dinner Revival, The Telegraph, 08, 07, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7879198/Jamie-Oliver-inspires-school-meal-revival.html

Week in review

Hello, thanks for tuning in again for this week’s edition of the Week in Review. This week we are focusing on the role that information and communications technology (ICTs) plays in progress and how we can use the data that is procured from various communication devices for measuring progress.

Report released:
This week, the World Bank released the 2012 edition of Information and Communication for Development with a focus on the use of mobile phone technology. Around three-quarters of global population now have access to a mobile phone; the significance of developments in the mobile communications story is not about the phone itself, but about how it is used.
Read highlights and download the full report: Information and Communication Technology for Development - Maximizing Mobile

On big data
Mobile phone data - the oil of the digital age (The Guardian 19.07.2012)
In keeping with this week’s theme of mobile technology, this article focuses on the real-time data that reflects the behaviour of emerging markets and the role that mobile phones can play in the newly emerged field of big data.

Number crunch:
Worldwide Mobile subscriptions have grown from 1 billion in 2000 to over 6 billion in 2012, of which 5 billion are in developing countries.

Data on Women
Officials Decry “Appalling Gaps” in Global Data on Women (IPS 19.07.2012)
This week the World Bank and U.S. government announced new initiatives to develop knowledge on the experience of women around the world. Both recognised the impact that the ‘global data gap’ has on women and the importance of filling that gap.

Quote
Speaking about global data gap, Hillary Clinton said: “For too many countries, we lack reliable and regular data on even the basic facts about the lives of women and girls – facts like when they have their first child, how many hours of paid and unpaid work they do, whether they own the land they farm. And since women make up half the population, that’s like having a black hole at the centre of our data-driven universe.” (source: IPS Gender Wire)

That’s all from me this week. I hope to see you again next week- in the meantime if anything interesting catches your eye please send it via Twitter, Facebook or email.

Yours in Progress,
Philippa Lysaght

The Child Development Index 2012

So, the Child Development Index 2012: Progress, Challenges and Inequality is out. Launched in 2008 as a complement to the Human Development Index, the CDI is designed to capture progress in child well-being. The index combines measures of health, education and nutrition, for 141 countries, tracking across three periods: 1995-1999, 2000-2004, and 2005-2010.

What does the report say? Here’s the good news: over a decade or so, from the late 1990s, there has been substantial progress. By the late 2000s, the chances of a child going to school were one-third higher, while the chances of their dying before their fifth birthday were one-third lower. Child well-being improved in 90% of the countries where we had data (that’s 127 countries). Across each indicator, and especially in the poorest countries, there was a striking and welcome acceleration in progress in the most recent period.

And the bad news? Above all, it is that progress on nutrition has been feeble in comparison with the other two components. When we looked at wasting (the more responsive measure of under-nutrition), it actually showed a rise – of 1.5 million children, compared with the early 2000s. Increasingly then, under-nutrition looks like the biggest challenge to child well-being – or at the least, the worst performing component of the index.

So that’s the progress and the challenges, leaving one element of the subtitle – inequality. At the most basic level, for a given average per capita income, a distribution that favours the poorest households will be associated with less under-nutrition. Just a few weeks ago we published a report on social protection, A Chance to Grow, showing that – following a World Bank methodology – transfers costing just 1.5% of GDP in low- and middle-income countries would take tens of millions out of under-nutrition.

In the CDI we looked at different possible relationships. Using household survey data, we compared national average nutrition outcomes with the extent of inequality on the same outcomes between the strongest and weakest performing groups. The graph below shows the scatterplot for national underweight prevalence and the prevalence gap between household wealth quintiles – and it’s worth noting that there seemed to be a similar pattern for different nutrition outcomes (stunting and wasting as well as underweight prevalence) and different dimensions of inequality (urban-rural and maternal education level as well as household wealth).

 Needless to say, the report contains a great deal more information on how countries and regions perform, a comparison with the Human Development Index, and the continuing weaknesses in the underlying data (on which note – many thanks to Terry McKinley and Giovanni Cozzi from CDPR at SOAS for the number-crunching and comments).

I’ll return to some of this in later posts, but in the meantime you can find the full report here – comments most welcome. 


Alex Cobham
Save the Children 

What would it cost to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)…USD 120 billion?

The 2015 deadline to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) raises the question of what it will cost and who will fund meeting the MDGs. Analysis reveals that achieving the MDGs is at least as much about policies as about financing.

About a 100 of us, mainly OECD staff turned up to listen to the discussion on “What would it take to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (#MDGs) by 2015?” on 11 July 2012 in Paris. This was the 4^th DAC Development debate, a joint venture between The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and DevelopmentCo-operation Directorate (DCD). For the first hour we were presented with the main findings of the Development Centres’ study “Canwe still achieve the Millennium Development Goals? From cost to policies.” OECD, April 2012.  

The aim of the study was to:

a) revisit the cost estimations of the Millennium Development Goals to which development agencies contributed during the early 2000s and

b) provide an assessment of developing countries’ own capacity to fund additional development investment through domestic resources (taxes in particular) and external resources such as FDI, remittances, private donations and aid.

This means moving away from a donor-centric approach and focusing more on each country’s individual resources and capacities to achieve the MDGs.

The study highlighted the following policy implications:

1. The financial cost of meeting the MDGs related to poverty, education and health is in the order of USD 120 billion. This would imply a tripling of the current level of country programmable aid, i.e. the portion of aid that actually goes from OECD countries to partner countries.

2. As Aid is unlikely to rise to meet this funding gap by 2015, countries will need to find new sources of funding and make better use of existing ones. Therefore, the quality of public policies and institutions are important to meet the MDGs. Tax collection, public expenditure and the investment climate must continue to improve in developing countries. But to succeed, we need the political will and also we need policy coherence and aid effectiveness.

3. One size does not fit all to fund the MDGs. The challenges countries face, and their capacity to meet them, vary considerably. In upper middle-income countries with annual income above USD 4 000 per person, tax potential estimates show that there is enough room to stimulate tax collection to achieve the MDGs.

4. Middle-income countries have to look more at inequality than the lack of resources. The goals are affordable domestically using targeted cash transfers and spending on poverty, education and health.

5. In other developing countries, as institutional reforms take years to bear fruit, tax revenue mobilisation is not a short-term solution.

6. Official Development Assistance is expected to remain at current levels for the future. And that is the best-case scenario. More than ever, aid will need to be complemented by private capital, development cooperation among countries of the South, remittances from migrants and private donations.

7. The main challenge is to ensure that all these resources contribute to sustainable, inclusive growth and to social development.

I assume that many, like myself wondered what had happened over the last 12 years… In 2000, the international community came together to agree upon the MDGs and in so doing committed itself to working together to put an end to poverty, hunger, disease and lack of adequate shelter by 2015. The initial determination and drive had gone, and it somehow felt like this last stretch was going to be a challenge, as if there just wasn't much momentum left.

Also, can and should one really put a price tag on such things…what’s the cost of resolving climate change, conflicts in fragile countries? The MDGs were conceived to be met at a global level, but the last 12 years have shown the limitations of this approach, such as the difficulty in adopting the right time-frame, determining costs and official development assistance (ODA).

Now twelve years later, hundreds of millions of people have moved out of extreme poverty mainly thanks to high growth in large countries such as Brazil, China and India. However, the challenges of fighting extreme poverty in all countries and of achieving the MDGs remain.

The Bottom Line

So, USD 120 billion is needed to achieve six of the key MDGs but that’s more than the size of the official development assistance that can be raised in the foreseeable future. Yet, it is not insurmountable if the whole range of development resources is fully mobilised.

David McNair of Save the Children (content partner on Wikiprogress) in his Guardian Blog, “Who's going to pay for the MDGs?” argues that “Aid alone is not enough, but transparency and accountability are essential if tax revenues are to be used to plug the financing gap”. 

Well, sitting in that room I felt like we would need far more than what both the study above and McNair propose, the international community will have to find some of that initial passion and motivation if we are to have any chance of achieving the MDGs in the final home run. 

Finally there are important lessons that must be drawn from experiences so far for the designers of the framework that follows on from the MDGs – it must be a framework that tackles inequality as well as poverty and factors in how different components of well-being (income, health, etc.) contribute to people's  personal sense of how their lives are and what they value in their lives.

Salema Gulbahar 
Wikiprogress Co-ordinator