Are you ready for MDGs 2.0?

by | Feb 15, 2011 | Africa, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Global system, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia

The UN this week announced a June MDG review meeting in Tokyo. This is the conference that Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan at the MDGs Summit proposed that Japan convene in 2011 (see page 4, paragraph 1 of his speech).

One thing it may or may not discuss (depending on who you speak to) is what might replace the MDGs in 2015 which is likely to be one of the big global development policy debate of the next few years.

At the MDG summit last September the outcome document requested the President of the UN general assembly to organise a ‘special event’ in 2013 ‘to follow up on efforts made’. However, it is not yet clear exactly what this will mean. The outcome document also mandated the UN Secretary General to initiate a consultation process of what would come after 2015, and to recommend in his annual reports ‘further steps to advance the United Nations development agenda beyond 2015’.

It is possible though that there will be neither an agreement on any post-2015 framework nor an extension of the current MDGs.

Not surprisingly, the subject of what a new global framework might look like in detail is really starting to bubble up in debates.

The NGOs via GCAP are already discussing MDGs 2.0 and there was a workshop at the World Social Forum recently and blog convened by the UK NGOs. UNDP’s Helen Clark has it on her radar in a recent interview as does UNDP assistant SG, Olav Kjorven at UNDP in comments on a Guardian blog.

There’s also a global group convened by the International Red Cross and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a recent Lancet Commission report and one by International Alert and papers by MDG architects such as the former chair of the OECD DAC, Richard Manning and former UN official, Jan Vandemoortele (and a set of papers from a Brussels Forum on the ‘MDGs and Beyond’) as well as work at the Center for Global Development (for example, here in Global Policy, and here), a symposium at Harvard and – launching soon – CAFOD’s work on Voices of the South on the MDGs and post-MDGs.

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Cable Cars for Development?

by | Feb 14, 2011 | Economics and development, Latin America and the Caribbean

Step forward today’s candidate for least likely development hero of the week. It’s the cable car.  Traffic in some of the  big cities of the developing world is unimaginably awful, with two or three hour commutes to work absolutely normal.  And the poorest, living in new, informal settlements on the edges of cities often have the longest journeys.  But building mass transport systems like metros or trams is expensive, and takes years.  Luckily a quicker solution is at hand.  Last week it was reported that Brazil’s government are planning to build cable cars to connect the sprawling favelas to the centre of Rio. They are following in the footsteps of Colombia, where the cable car in the city of Medellin is estimated to have cut commuting times for those living in far flung urban settlements from over two hours to as little as 40 minutes. Cable cars are, apparently, easier to build than other mass-transport systems. They can float over inhospitable, steep, rocky or muddy terrain.   And cutting commuting times from hours to minutes changes lives. 

Cable cars – for life, not just for skiing?