Millennium Villages Blog

Last month, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund published the 2009 Global Monitoring Report to show our progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. Aptly titled A Development Emergency, the report is full of sobering statistics about the potential impact of the economic crisis on the world’s poorest people. According to the report, the crisis may push more than 50 million additional people into extreme poverty in 2009. About 200,000 to 400,000 more babies may die each year between 2009 and 2015. And this year some 30 million people around the world may become newly unemployed – 23 million of whom live in developing countries.

To exacerbate matters, past experience shows that development outcomes deteriorate more quickly during periods of economic decline than they improve during periods of growth. The numerous development successes of recent years are under threat and any losses may never be regained by our generation. In other words, we are in a development emergency.

As horrific as it is to read about babies dying as a result of a corrupt financial system that finally (and inevitably) collapsed, the development emergency isn’t new. Rising food prices and a recent food crisis pushed an estimated 160 million to 200 million more people into extreme poverty between 2005 and 2008. Food production has been further damaged by the fuel crisis – contributing to the one billion people who now suffer from hunger. And we have yet to fully understand the impact of the multiple crises that will result from the slow but steady effects of climate change.

So it’s safe to conclude that any global crisis will result in a humanitarian emergency as long as one billion people continue to struggle on less than a dollar a day. Achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 is an important step towards the one solution – finally ending extreme poverty. The world committed to the Goals in 2000; our leaders promised to finance them. Yet, at the halfway mark in 2008, and well before the economic meltdown, most of the financial commitments hadn’t come through. Combined with the triple threat of a food, fuel and financial crisis, there is serious concern that we may not make the 2015 deadline. Once again, the world’s most vulnerable people will suffer the consequences.

In referring to the current financial crisis, the Global Monitoring Report stresses that a global crisis requires a global response. Let’s not forget that extreme poverty is also a global crisis that requires a global response. Every one of us can – and must – do something to help meet the Millennium Development Goals. Only then will we finally get a report titled Back on Track.

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