Goals, targets, activities and indicators

The most successful individuals and organisations do not just muddle through life hoping for the best. They think carefully about their situation and make careful and detailed plans to improve it. This means that they will have:

clear goals which most people think are good ones
specific targets that have to be reached by a particular time
costed activities which will lead them from where they are to where they want to be
indicators (things to be measured) to show whether the plan is working

Each of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is attached to specific targets and indicators. These were agreed by world leaders at international conferences.

The goals and targets give a clear picture of what the world could look like by 2015. The indicators give us something definite to measure so that we can know if we are getting there.

The MDG system therefore provides a beginning and an ending. Individual countries must fill the middle by designing a set of costed activities which meet their particular needs.

Most poor countries now have Poverty Reduction Strategies which fill the gap in the MDG system. These strategies describe a set of activities which will lead to pro-poor growth. This makes it much easier for governments to prepare pro-poor budgets and for donors and lenders to know where to give support.

The Poverty Reduction Strategies are supposed to be designed through a process of wide consultation and to be country-owned. But they are remarkably similar for different countries. This might be because most countries use a lot of foreign experts to help them understand the causes of poverty and how it might be reduced. And these experts work to a small number of blueprints. But we can see this as a short-term problem - as a phase in history which we are passing through.

At least the MDGs now exist as a clear set of ideas for different stakeholders to get to grips with. And the Poverty Reduction Strategies are 'living documents'. In participatory democracies they can be changed through advocacy and lobbying.

The challenge is therefore for all stakeholders to be more active in figuring out the causes of poverty and how it might be reduced. It has been said that the real experts on poverty are the poor people themselves. No real progress will be made until they play an active part in helping to define goals, targets, activities and indicators for poverty reduction at local, national and global levels.

From a sheepherder in Mongolia to a shopkeeper in Mexico, the idea of cutting poverty, putting kids in schools, building a cleaner environment and providing better healthcare for mothers and infants is something that they can relate to in a very tangible way.

It makes development local - and thus provides a unique development entry point into political debate by focusing on the issues that really matter to ordinary people.
[Mark Malloch Brown, 2003]

Aid has become increasingly technocratic, with an overwhelming reliance on donor systems of aid management and accountability, implemented by a host of consultants and advisors.

The World Bank reports that some 100,000 foreign experts are currently employed in Africa, tending to displace local experts and weaken capacity."
[The Reality of Aid, 2002]

"Since the answers to fundamental and serious concerns are not to hand, there is no alternative but to keep on trying to find them."

[The Bruntland Report,1987]