Oxford Professor of Economics Paul Collier doesn't see the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) as any sort of practical solution. While the rest of the world accumulates wealth and continues to grow, almost a billion people - 70 percent of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa - are not going anywhere. Their static economies are shutting them out of the global market. According to Professor Collier, this "bottom billion" are not being affected in the least by the world's heroic effort to end poverty.
"None of the Millennium Development Goals will be reached within seven years amongst the bottom billion."
 Professor Paul Collier says the Millennium Development Goals are by no means a practical way to end poverty. |
Stagnating strategies
Collier is certainly not against the MDG. He thinks they are very helpful in monitoring whether or not things are getting better. They also focus international agendas on issues such as AIDS and education. But they don't lead to change, he says. They are not transformative.
"Of course we should be concerned to not just half poverty but eliminate poverty in the poorest countries. And by any measure, including the Millennium Development Goals, we're failing." "We need to compliment, to supplement those goals with practical agendas that really would be transformative."
A similar solution
According to the professor, the situation can be remedied by focusing on three policies that were utilised to rebuild Europe after the Second World War: trade, security and stable government.
"We've got to move on from gesture politics to getting serious. Think what we do when we're really serious about a problem. Think what America did in how it rebuilt Europe after the Second World War. Today, we should use the same array of policies that we used before."
But international trade agreements exclude much of sub-Saharan Africa from globalisation. Agreements in Europe, for example, make it impossible to sell certain goods from Africa in European markets. Professor Collier finds that trade deals such as these as well as rampant civil wars and internal corruption only further ostracise the bottom billion.
Too limited an objective
In order for things to get better, he thinks we've got to change our strategies. We have to go further than the MDG.
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Tags: Africa, AIDS, Collier, education, foreign aid, globalisation, market, Millennium development goals, poor, poverty, sub-Sahara, world economy