21st Century Aid: Recognizing success and tackling failure (April 2010)

PROGRESS ON THE MDGs:

• There are 33 million more children in the classroom, partly as a result of increased resources to developing country governments over the past decade from aid and debt relief.
• There has been a ten-fold increase in the coverage of antiretroviral treatment (ART) for HIV and AIDS over a five-year time span.
• In Zambia, there are more than 60 times more people on lifesaving ART.

Distance to go to reaching the MDGs

• As recently as 2007, nine million children under the age of five died from largely preventable diseases.
• On current projections, MDG 4, which aims to reduce deaths of children under the age of five by two-thirds, will not be met until 2045.
• Every year, 350,000 women and girls die as a result of complications due to child bearing – the vast majority of them in developing countries.
• In 2009 donors provided only a fraction more in aid (0.7%) keeping them way off track on their commitments
• 2009 saw aid levels falling from over half of the rich country OECD DAC members (Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, NL, NZ, Portugal, Spain)
• The shortfall of aid that has not been provided since 1970, when governments first committed to the 0.7 per cent figure, now amounts to over $3 trillion.
• In 2008, the only countries to reach or exceed the UN target were Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.
• If governments had provided what they committed to in 1970, extreme poverty (at 2005 levels) could now have been ended 22 times over.
• On current trends, donors will not hit 0.7 per cent until 2050.
• Without vast increases in the aid being provided currently, Germany will not reach 0.7 per cent before 2027, and the USA until around 2055.
• The World Bank has recently forecast that 50,000 more children in Sub-Saharan African countries may have died this year because of the financial crisis
• Research shows that estimates that low-income countries are facing a financing gap of $32 billion as a result of the crisis.
• The International Monetary Fund estimates that Foreign Direct Investment will fall by 25% in 2010 because of weak GDP growth in advanced economies and overall weak conditions in the global economy.
• In 2009 the total number of hungry people worldwide was projected to reach a historic high of 1,020 million.