Are we on track?
The Millennium Development Goals are not just another set of goals. They are different. The MDGs are not the next step, but a final step. At the turn of the millennium, world leaders at the highest political level, looking back on decades full of negotiations, policies and targets at fault, declared that from now on the eradication of poverty shall have first and foremost priority, within all countries and worldwide. Any other interpretation of the Declaration would be disputable. In the year 2015, no responsible political leader would be entitled to say, once more: ‘the goals may not have been reached, but progress has been made and they have helped to keep us alert and the issue alive’.
Heads of State and Government have made the MDGs the responsibility of all countries, all national departments and all international agencies, by making them the centrepiece of the Millennium Declaration. There is no higher or broader forum than a summit. The Declaration is not a legally binding document, but the highest political commitment possible, not made in passing, but with all eyes open.
The MDGs are achievable. It has been said so in many terms, by all political leaders concerned, fully aware of both the challenge and the obstacles. Will they be achieved? The first signs are not positive. The goals were set at a political summit in the year 2000. At the Johannesburg Summit in 2002, where decisions ought to have been taken on the implementation machinery, the same political leaders were unable to take any steps further than reconfirming their earlier commitments. No decisions were made concerning the instruments necessary to realise the goals, nor on who should do what, nor on an effective review and feedback mechanism. Since then not much progress has been made.
Let me express some of my concerns.16
First, there is no road map. There is much talk of a ‘Development Compact’, but as yet it does not exist. All references to such a compact in international documents are phrased in terms of ‘ought to be’ and ‘should be’. That is wishful thinking. There is no such a thing as a Development Compact, with freshly agreed language on how to focus international trade, finance and technology policy on the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals rather than the traditional objectives of the previous decades. The recent Human Development Report devoted to the MDGs is full of questions and recommendations, but has no agreed answers. It is a state of the art document laying out what policies, according to present insights and on the basis of lessons learned, could or should be pursued in trade, debt, industry, science and technology, education, health, water, agriculture, food and nutrition, energy and other resources, the environment and ecosystems, but it cannot point to any new agreement in these fields. It rightly points out that there is a need for country ownership, driven not only by governments but by many actors (local governments, communities, and civil society groups), and a need for a comprehensive approach, bottom up and participatory, worded in ‘correct’ development language: gender, empowerment, accountability, partnership, social mobilisation, a cautious approach towards both privatisation and decentralisation.17 But all these references together are not a strategy, only proposals, a Millennium Development Compact ‘proposed’. [UNDP, 2003, 15]
Second, the MDGs are still seen too much as belonging to the traditional field of development policy. It is customary to see development goals as a specific responsibility of developing countries, and the specific governmental departments within these countries, together with the corresponding UN agencies, rather than as a global common responsibility that also includes the Northern countries and international institutions like WTO and IMF. After all, Heads of State and Government committed themselves to deal with global – that is worldwide – poverty, wherever and with all means, attacking all possible causes, not restricting themselves to foreign aid, but undertaking also to remove national and international constraints: protectionism, monopolistic and discriminatory practices, and other external obstacles for developing countries to attack poverty within their borders. Maintaining such obstacles would make foreign assistance a form of compensation for being kept at a distance, rather than a net investment in poverty reduction. So far, however, the agenda for the Doha Round on international trade has not been changed in the light of the commitment to meet the MDGs. Poverty was not on the agenda in Cancun, earlier this year.
Nor are the Millennium Development Goals a key subject on the agenda of the International Financial Institutions.18 Debt rescheduling should focus on poverty alleviation. However, despite the summit agreements, neither the proceedings of the Paris Club nor the debt rescheduling programme for the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) have been redesigned. There can be no debt sustainability without social sustainability. Debt and poverty are related. Debt reduction and poverty reduction ought to be related as well, by making adequate finance available for both, in an integrated policy. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), introduced by the World Bank and serving as the basis for aid allocations from most donor countries, could be the basis of such an integrated approach. However, the concept and procedures of the PRSPs have not yet been systematically reorganised either. The World Bank assumes current budgetary levels and foreign resource levels as given, rather than making the agreed 50% cut in poverty by 2015 the key objective of its strategy. Instead of one integrated approach to poverty reduction we now have competing schemes and pathetic efforts to coordinate. [UNDP, 2003, 20-22, 149] All this illustrates that the Millennium Development Goals still are not the once and for all objectives of the countries and the institutions that have the power to decide.
Third: there is no focus. At the Johannesburg Summit, the Secretary General of the United Nations proposed focusing action on five sectors: water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity (WEHAB) and giving priority to policies in these sectors which contribute to poverty reduction. It was an attractive proposal, because sustainable development in these sectors is a precondition for lasting poverty reduction. However, no agreement could be reached on attaching less priority to other sectors. In principle a comprehensive and simultaneous approach in all sectors would be better than a selective approach. However, if you want to cover everything, you may end up doing nothing. If an overall approach overburdened implementation capacity, it would paralyse action, as now seems to be the case.
Fourth: there still is a shortage of finance. There is no agreement on the costs of implementation. Estimates have been made for the goals on health and water. A group led by Jeffrey Sachs has calculated that meeting the goals on health would require additional foreign aid of billion annually. [Sachs, 2001] In policy terms this is a step forward compared with another WHO report on global health tasks published five years earlier, which – after stating the need to set new priorities based on the conviction that health is a human right – concluded: ‘Once this conviction is established, society itself will bring new light to bear on resource issues …’. [WHO, 1997, 38]19 For drinking water a commission chaired by Michel Camdessus has calculated that the realisation of the target would require 0 billion annually, but this is considered a gross exaggeration by the World Water and Sanitation Collaborative Council, which has presented an annual figure of billion. [United Nations, 2002b, 16[ [WSSCC, 2002, 8] It is unclear which parts of these figures would have to be additional to current expenditure. The UN concludes that ‘further work is required to have a more accurate and better understanding of the global financial requirements to meet the ….MDGs’ [United Nations, 2002b, 16] That is obvious, but it would have been helpful if that work had been carried out before the goal was set. However, for the other Millennium Development Goals there are no separate cost estimates. Needless to say, none of the MDGs have a financial plan. Nor is there a financial plan to implement the Millennium Strategy as a whole. There are some rough estimates of the additional external assistance required to meet global objectives. They range from to 0 billion a year. One of these is the figure of billion mentioned by a UN commission led by former Mexican President Zedillo. [United Nations, 2001] This latter figure – which was a starting point for the World Summit on Finance and Development in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2002 – is called ‘conservative’ by the authors of the Human Development Report [UNDP, 2003, 346]. That is understandable in the light of the figures for health and water only.20 However, even this conservative estimate did not persuade the donors and the International Financial Institutions to agree on a common finance strategy. The new aid commitments presented in Monterrey by the USA and the European Union were explicitly not intended to help finance a Johannesburg Plan of Action to implement the Millennium Development Goals.
Fifth: foreign aid is missing the mark. Since the Washington consensus became the guideline for aid allocations there is so much emphasis on good governance in developing countries as a precondition for receiving aid, that the assistance itself can no longer help improve the situation within these countries. Rather than aid being used as a catalyst, helping to bring about better policies and better governance, the countries themselves are expected to make such improvements before receiving any aid. Quite a few countries are not in a position to help themselves, for reasons which I mentioned earlier. They are then deprived of foreign aid. Countries that are able to improve policies and governance to the liking of donors receive aid as a reward. For them this aid is either no longer necessary, because good governance can be rewarded by the market, or it comes too late. In all three situations, as far as poverty reduction is concerned, present-day donor preferences for so-called performance-driven aid allocations are overshooting the mark. [Pronk, 2001 and 2003a]
Sixth: poverty reduction will increasingly become more urgent and difficult because of the critical trends in the ecological and physical environment. The loss in global biodiversity, the change in the global climate, the increasing scarcity of basic resources such as water and energy and distortions of the ecosystems are no new phenomena. However, recent studies seem to indicate that these changes are now moving faster and are having a greater impact than in the past. The poorest people are the first victims: they live in the most vulnerable places, with less productive soils, in arid regions, polluted slums, eroded hill slopes and flood-prone coastal areas and river plains. They are the least protected against environmental crime and the whims of nature. Poverty due to deterioration of the global environment is on the rise. Poverty due to conflicts about increasingly scarce resources will increase as well. While in international fora, environmental risks seem to have lost the competition for attention against security risks. This imposes a heavy mortgage on the attainment of the poverty goals.
I am not concerned that the emphasis on the quantitative character of the MDGs would jeopardise their quality. The goals can not be attained without community action at local level. Quality should be defined in terms of priorities and objectives set by people rather than authorities. Meeting the MDGs requires recognition of the desires, aspirations and initiatives of poor people themselves and thus of local processes. However, it is too late to say that the process is more important than the result. A recent editorial in the Dutch quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad criticised the MDGs as being too absolute. It made a plea to be realistic, to count the blessings of the past and, in the future, concentrate on what is feasible.21 The authors of the Human Development Report also warn against taking the goals ‘out of context and (seeing) them as ends in themselves rather than as benchmarks of progress towards a broader goal of eradicating human poverty’ [UNDP, 2003, 30] The MDGs indeed have a context: survival and a better quality of life, according to the wishes of the people themselves. Poverty has more dimensions than those related to the goals: food, health, water, knowledge and the resources to survive and secure a better life. But these dimensions cannot be traded against others. They are more than ends in themselves, they are ends in their own right. Too much emphasis on process may result in complacency amongst politicians, who tend to be quickly satisfied when they note that there is improvement; slow improvement, less than had been intended, but improvement nevertheless.
This tendency is manifest in the follow up to the summit meetings in New York and Johannesburg. Instead of putting implementation of Millennium Development Goals on the agenda of the regular international talks in key institutions such as WTO, IMF, the World Bank and the Multilateral Environmental Agreements, the emphasis is technocratic and thus a-political. Much thought is given to statistics, benchmarks, performance indicators, monitoring and reporting. However, keeping track of what is going on should not be confused with the action itself. Deliberating which indicators are best to judge whether progress has been made does not constitute action-oriented implementation. On the contrary, efforts to develop performance indicators can often prompt politicians to adopt a wait and see attitude, pending proposals from the bureaucracy, followed by lengthy disputes, and thereby postponing action.
For all these reasons, it is no surprise that we are far behind schedule. As was recently emphasised by Jan Vandemoortele, a UN official working in this field, the MDGs are ‘technically feasible and financially affordable. Yet, the world is off track to meeting them by 2015’. [Vandemoortele, 2003, 16] And the authors of the Human Development Report, while stating ‘(that) all countries can meaningfully achieve the Millennium Development Goals is beyond doubt’ present a timeline showing that in most regions most goals will not be achieved if progress does not accelerate. [UNDP, 2003, 50 and figure 2.1] That applies not only to Africa, as some might expect, but to Asia as well. [United Nations, 2003, table 1]. And a recent report of internal UN discussions starts with the alarming diagnosis: ‘We (the development community) are losing: a dramatic change of direction is needed to reach the MDGs.’22
Such a dramatic change of direction requires political leadership. The implementation of the poverty targets should not be left to experts, bureaucrats and diplomats. It should be permanently on the political agenda, within countries and in the international system: the intergovernmental machinery and the relevant global institutions. In these bodies the discussion should not be limited to a review of the state of affairs. All political and institutional power available should be used to apply pressure on authorities and agencies not to shy away from the commitments made by Heads of State and Government, but to keep their promises. No second thoughts, as is so often the case in international fora, after the political leaders have spoken and left the scene. And those political leaders themselves have to live up to their commitments. Rather than being confident that the job will be done, they have to stay alert and active themselves. Also where commitments are still political, without yet having been enshrined in legally binding treaties with compliance regimes and sanctions and in institutions with enforcement regimes, there are still political possibilities to ensure implementation. But that requires the willingness to show political leadership. And to use a mandate not only to discipline governance in poor countries, as has been IMF practice, but also the governance of the economically advanced. That this is possible has been shown by WTO and the European Commission. However, these powers should also be applied to combat poverty, not only to ensure stability and a level playing field.
It may look strange that, while poverty eradication basically requires a bottom-up approach, empowerment of the poor, community initiatives, participation of individuals, capacity building at the level of the household, the attainment of the Millennium Development and Poverty Goals should depend so much on political leadership, which always implies a certain top-down policy. Is that an anomaly? No, because there are community initiatives, social movements are alive, empowerment struggles are being fought, social mobilisation and emancipation are taking place. These do not have to be manufactured from above. They exist. But they are threatened by other forces: the strength of the not-poor and the middle class in a scramble for the fruits of globalisation. After all, poverty reduction is also a matter of redistribution and sharing. And that is where political leadership is required: to give room, living space, and a perspective to poor peoples trying to take their fate in their own hands and to secure a fair redistribution.
Heads of State and Government have made the MDGs the responsibility of all countries, all national departments and all international agencies, by making them the centrepiece of the Millennium Declaration. There is no higher or broader forum than a summit. The Declaration is not a legally binding document, but the highest political commitment possible, not made in passing, but with all eyes open.
The MDGs are achievable. It has been said so in many terms, by all political leaders concerned, fully aware of both the challenge and the obstacles. Will they be achieved? The first signs are not positive. The goals were set at a political summit in the year 2000. At the Johannesburg Summit in 2002, where decisions ought to have been taken on the implementation machinery, the same political leaders were unable to take any steps further than reconfirming their earlier commitments. No decisions were made concerning the instruments necessary to realise the goals, nor on who should do what, nor on an effective review and feedback mechanism. Since then not much progress has been made.
Let me express some of my concerns.16
First, there is no road map. There is much talk of a ‘Development Compact’, but as yet it does not exist. All references to such a compact in international documents are phrased in terms of ‘ought to be’ and ‘should be’. That is wishful thinking. There is no such a thing as a Development Compact, with freshly agreed language on how to focus international trade, finance and technology policy on the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals rather than the traditional objectives of the previous decades. The recent Human Development Report devoted to the MDGs is full of questions and recommendations, but has no agreed answers. It is a state of the art document laying out what policies, according to present insights and on the basis of lessons learned, could or should be pursued in trade, debt, industry, science and technology, education, health, water, agriculture, food and nutrition, energy and other resources, the environment and ecosystems, but it cannot point to any new agreement in these fields. It rightly points out that there is a need for country ownership, driven not only by governments but by many actors (local governments, communities, and civil society groups), and a need for a comprehensive approach, bottom up and participatory, worded in ‘correct’ development language: gender, empowerment, accountability, partnership, social mobilisation, a cautious approach towards both privatisation and decentralisation.17 But all these references together are not a strategy, only proposals, a Millennium Development Compact ‘proposed’. [UNDP, 2003, 15]
Second, the MDGs are still seen too much as belonging to the traditional field of development policy. It is customary to see development goals as a specific responsibility of developing countries, and the specific governmental departments within these countries, together with the corresponding UN agencies, rather than as a global common responsibility that also includes the Northern countries and international institutions like WTO and IMF. After all, Heads of State and Government committed themselves to deal with global – that is worldwide – poverty, wherever and with all means, attacking all possible causes, not restricting themselves to foreign aid, but undertaking also to remove national and international constraints: protectionism, monopolistic and discriminatory practices, and other external obstacles for developing countries to attack poverty within their borders. Maintaining such obstacles would make foreign assistance a form of compensation for being kept at a distance, rather than a net investment in poverty reduction. So far, however, the agenda for the Doha Round on international trade has not been changed in the light of the commitment to meet the MDGs. Poverty was not on the agenda in Cancun, earlier this year.
Nor are the Millennium Development Goals a key subject on the agenda of the International Financial Institutions.18 Debt rescheduling should focus on poverty alleviation. However, despite the summit agreements, neither the proceedings of the Paris Club nor the debt rescheduling programme for the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) have been redesigned. There can be no debt sustainability without social sustainability. Debt and poverty are related. Debt reduction and poverty reduction ought to be related as well, by making adequate finance available for both, in an integrated policy. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), introduced by the World Bank and serving as the basis for aid allocations from most donor countries, could be the basis of such an integrated approach. However, the concept and procedures of the PRSPs have not yet been systematically reorganised either. The World Bank assumes current budgetary levels and foreign resource levels as given, rather than making the agreed 50% cut in poverty by 2015 the key objective of its strategy. Instead of one integrated approach to poverty reduction we now have competing schemes and pathetic efforts to coordinate. [UNDP, 2003, 20-22, 149] All this illustrates that the Millennium Development Goals still are not the once and for all objectives of the countries and the institutions that have the power to decide.
Third: there is no focus. At the Johannesburg Summit, the Secretary General of the United Nations proposed focusing action on five sectors: water, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity (WEHAB) and giving priority to policies in these sectors which contribute to poverty reduction. It was an attractive proposal, because sustainable development in these sectors is a precondition for lasting poverty reduction. However, no agreement could be reached on attaching less priority to other sectors. In principle a comprehensive and simultaneous approach in all sectors would be better than a selective approach. However, if you want to cover everything, you may end up doing nothing. If an overall approach overburdened implementation capacity, it would paralyse action, as now seems to be the case.
Fourth: there still is a shortage of finance. There is no agreement on the costs of implementation. Estimates have been made for the goals on health and water. A group led by Jeffrey Sachs has calculated that meeting the goals on health would require additional foreign aid of billion annually. [Sachs, 2001] In policy terms this is a step forward compared with another WHO report on global health tasks published five years earlier, which – after stating the need to set new priorities based on the conviction that health is a human right – concluded: ‘Once this conviction is established, society itself will bring new light to bear on resource issues …’. [WHO, 1997, 38]19 For drinking water a commission chaired by Michel Camdessus has calculated that the realisation of the target would require 0 billion annually, but this is considered a gross exaggeration by the World Water and Sanitation Collaborative Council, which has presented an annual figure of billion. [United Nations, 2002b, 16[ [WSSCC, 2002, 8] It is unclear which parts of these figures would have to be additional to current expenditure. The UN concludes that ‘further work is required to have a more accurate and better understanding of the global financial requirements to meet the ….MDGs’ [United Nations, 2002b, 16] That is obvious, but it would have been helpful if that work had been carried out before the goal was set. However, for the other Millennium Development Goals there are no separate cost estimates. Needless to say, none of the MDGs have a financial plan. Nor is there a financial plan to implement the Millennium Strategy as a whole. There are some rough estimates of the additional external assistance required to meet global objectives. They range from to 0 billion a year. One of these is the figure of billion mentioned by a UN commission led by former Mexican President Zedillo. [United Nations, 2001] This latter figure – which was a starting point for the World Summit on Finance and Development in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2002 – is called ‘conservative’ by the authors of the Human Development Report [UNDP, 2003, 346]. That is understandable in the light of the figures for health and water only.20 However, even this conservative estimate did not persuade the donors and the International Financial Institutions to agree on a common finance strategy. The new aid commitments presented in Monterrey by the USA and the European Union were explicitly not intended to help finance a Johannesburg Plan of Action to implement the Millennium Development Goals.
Fifth: foreign aid is missing the mark. Since the Washington consensus became the guideline for aid allocations there is so much emphasis on good governance in developing countries as a precondition for receiving aid, that the assistance itself can no longer help improve the situation within these countries. Rather than aid being used as a catalyst, helping to bring about better policies and better governance, the countries themselves are expected to make such improvements before receiving any aid. Quite a few countries are not in a position to help themselves, for reasons which I mentioned earlier. They are then deprived of foreign aid. Countries that are able to improve policies and governance to the liking of donors receive aid as a reward. For them this aid is either no longer necessary, because good governance can be rewarded by the market, or it comes too late. In all three situations, as far as poverty reduction is concerned, present-day donor preferences for so-called performance-driven aid allocations are overshooting the mark. [Pronk, 2001 and 2003a]
Sixth: poverty reduction will increasingly become more urgent and difficult because of the critical trends in the ecological and physical environment. The loss in global biodiversity, the change in the global climate, the increasing scarcity of basic resources such as water and energy and distortions of the ecosystems are no new phenomena. However, recent studies seem to indicate that these changes are now moving faster and are having a greater impact than in the past. The poorest people are the first victims: they live in the most vulnerable places, with less productive soils, in arid regions, polluted slums, eroded hill slopes and flood-prone coastal areas and river plains. They are the least protected against environmental crime and the whims of nature. Poverty due to deterioration of the global environment is on the rise. Poverty due to conflicts about increasingly scarce resources will increase as well. While in international fora, environmental risks seem to have lost the competition for attention against security risks. This imposes a heavy mortgage on the attainment of the poverty goals.
I am not concerned that the emphasis on the quantitative character of the MDGs would jeopardise their quality. The goals can not be attained without community action at local level. Quality should be defined in terms of priorities and objectives set by people rather than authorities. Meeting the MDGs requires recognition of the desires, aspirations and initiatives of poor people themselves and thus of local processes. However, it is too late to say that the process is more important than the result. A recent editorial in the Dutch quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad criticised the MDGs as being too absolute. It made a plea to be realistic, to count the blessings of the past and, in the future, concentrate on what is feasible.21 The authors of the Human Development Report also warn against taking the goals ‘out of context and (seeing) them as ends in themselves rather than as benchmarks of progress towards a broader goal of eradicating human poverty’ [UNDP, 2003, 30] The MDGs indeed have a context: survival and a better quality of life, according to the wishes of the people themselves. Poverty has more dimensions than those related to the goals: food, health, water, knowledge and the resources to survive and secure a better life. But these dimensions cannot be traded against others. They are more than ends in themselves, they are ends in their own right. Too much emphasis on process may result in complacency amongst politicians, who tend to be quickly satisfied when they note that there is improvement; slow improvement, less than had been intended, but improvement nevertheless.
This tendency is manifest in the follow up to the summit meetings in New York and Johannesburg. Instead of putting implementation of Millennium Development Goals on the agenda of the regular international talks in key institutions such as WTO, IMF, the World Bank and the Multilateral Environmental Agreements, the emphasis is technocratic and thus a-political. Much thought is given to statistics, benchmarks, performance indicators, monitoring and reporting. However, keeping track of what is going on should not be confused with the action itself. Deliberating which indicators are best to judge whether progress has been made does not constitute action-oriented implementation. On the contrary, efforts to develop performance indicators can often prompt politicians to adopt a wait and see attitude, pending proposals from the bureaucracy, followed by lengthy disputes, and thereby postponing action.
For all these reasons, it is no surprise that we are far behind schedule. As was recently emphasised by Jan Vandemoortele, a UN official working in this field, the MDGs are ‘technically feasible and financially affordable. Yet, the world is off track to meeting them by 2015’. [Vandemoortele, 2003, 16] And the authors of the Human Development Report, while stating ‘(that) all countries can meaningfully achieve the Millennium Development Goals is beyond doubt’ present a timeline showing that in most regions most goals will not be achieved if progress does not accelerate. [UNDP, 2003, 50 and figure 2.1] That applies not only to Africa, as some might expect, but to Asia as well. [United Nations, 2003, table 1]. And a recent report of internal UN discussions starts with the alarming diagnosis: ‘We (the development community) are losing: a dramatic change of direction is needed to reach the MDGs.’22
Such a dramatic change of direction requires political leadership. The implementation of the poverty targets should not be left to experts, bureaucrats and diplomats. It should be permanently on the political agenda, within countries and in the international system: the intergovernmental machinery and the relevant global institutions. In these bodies the discussion should not be limited to a review of the state of affairs. All political and institutional power available should be used to apply pressure on authorities and agencies not to shy away from the commitments made by Heads of State and Government, but to keep their promises. No second thoughts, as is so often the case in international fora, after the political leaders have spoken and left the scene. And those political leaders themselves have to live up to their commitments. Rather than being confident that the job will be done, they have to stay alert and active themselves. Also where commitments are still political, without yet having been enshrined in legally binding treaties with compliance regimes and sanctions and in institutions with enforcement regimes, there are still political possibilities to ensure implementation. But that requires the willingness to show political leadership. And to use a mandate not only to discipline governance in poor countries, as has been IMF practice, but also the governance of the economically advanced. That this is possible has been shown by WTO and the European Commission. However, these powers should also be applied to combat poverty, not only to ensure stability and a level playing field.
It may look strange that, while poverty eradication basically requires a bottom-up approach, empowerment of the poor, community initiatives, participation of individuals, capacity building at the level of the household, the attainment of the Millennium Development and Poverty Goals should depend so much on political leadership, which always implies a certain top-down policy. Is that an anomaly? No, because there are community initiatives, social movements are alive, empowerment struggles are being fought, social mobilisation and emancipation are taking place. These do not have to be manufactured from above. They exist. But they are threatened by other forces: the strength of the not-poor and the middle class in a scramble for the fruits of globalisation. After all, poverty reduction is also a matter of redistribution and sharing. And that is where political leadership is required: to give room, living space, and a perspective to poor peoples trying to take their fate in their own hands and to secure a fair redistribution.