The Millennium Development Goals and Disability
Tue, Dec 1, 2009
Source: Enable. UN
The MDGs established a unifying set of developmental objectives for the global community. Bringing together United Nations agencies, governments and civil society around eight key development issues, the MDGs foster collaborative action to reduce poverty, improve health and address educational and environmental concerns around the world’s most pressing development problems. The MDGs are specifically designed to address the needs of the world’s poorest citizens and the world’s most marginalized populations.
The eight Millennium Development Goals
MDGs will not be achieved however if their policies, programs, monitoring and evaluation do not include persons with disabilities. While persons with disabilities make up ten per cent of the world’s population, disability is associated with twenty per cent of global poverty according to the World Bank’s findings. Currently, there are no references to persons with disabilities either in the MDGs themselves or in the accompanying body of guidelines and policies, programs and conferences that are part of the on-going MDG efforts. In addition, the new revisions of the MDGs currently in process do not include persons with disabilities.
The international community needs urgently to act to mainstream disability in the MDG processes. This requires policy makers and technical experts specifically tasked with the programming, monitoring and evaluation of current MDG programs to begin to consider disability so that the next phase of the implementation of the MDGs will include disability as an important component of its core mission.
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Tags: IDPwD, MDGs, United Nations
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Mainstreaming disability in the MDGs is certainly a useful policy objective. MDGs have symbolic value as they reflect international agreement and many donors are paying attention to them. However, the MDGs themselves are not the whole development picture: they are just a fairly limited selection of indicators that have caught global attention, are agreed upon internationally and are relatively easy to report against (though of course not easy to achieve by 2015!). There are lots of other development agendas to keep our eyes on, beyond the scope of the MDGs, and beyond 2015. The real work to be done should be much more strategic and practice oriented, i.e. the work that is needed to make a difference in our societies so that the rights of people with disabilities are met. The use of a rights based approach, in partnership with others, is critical to this work.
We cannot Make Poverty History without dealing with the issue of disability.