Have the MDGs made a difference?

The numbers make it clear: the noughties were a boon for international aid and development efforts. Governments gave generously, and feel-good rhetoric like ‘the impossible is possible’ reverberated at development summits. After reaching its nadir in the 1990s, Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) as a share of donor country income crept upward in tandem with one ambitious monetary commitment after the other. With the Millenium Development Goals and the campaigning of celebrity do-gooders Bono and Bob Geldof, by mid-decade, donor countries had again committed to devote an unprecedented 0.7 per cent of GNP to international development and aid.

But with the recession that battered Western Europe and North America in the latter part of the decade, a weakening of donor country currencies has had some shrinking effects on the amount of aid outgoing. Aid commitments, typically expressed as a percentage of a now declining gross domestic product, not only have declined as actual numbers (0.7% of France’s robust pre-recession GDP is worth scores more than the same percentage of its sickly present day economy), but also have declined in value for countries whose currencies (like Britain’s) have slumped by reducing its purchasing power.

Over and above this weakening of donor country currencies, traditional donors saddled with bloated deficits have had to renege on their obligations for austerity’s sake. In important donor nations, there has been a shrinking of that magic number, the per cent of country GNP leaving the country as development aid. The 2009 French budget, for instance, foresaw development assistance equivalent to 0.47% of gross national product; it dropped to 0.41% in 2010 and sits at 0.42% this year.

What’s more, the will among governments to offer big increases in development funding is flagging. With the slow progress of the Millennium Development Goals, it seems much of the gusto garnered by Geldof et al in the early 2000s has receded into cynicism. The belief that development aid is, in the words of a particularly blunt US politician, ‘money down a rat hole’, is persistent, and many academics remain naysayers; meanwhile policymakers are beginning to doubt the transformative potential of the cash their countries have already put forward.

Girls and Women: Aid’s Saving Grace?

At the same time as aid figures flap, the idea that women are of crucial importance to the success of aid efforts has been gaining steam. Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director of the brand new United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), was keen to make to point that investing in girls is simply “smart economics” during a series of visits to western European capitals in May. The business rationale for gender equality seems to be one of UN Women’s official lines: “Gender equality is not only a basic human right, but as business, economic and development experts now agree, empowering women fuels economies and social progress,” reads its official website. When are women working and earning their own wages and they spend it on their families; so invest in a woman and you invest in her whole brood. Stats to back this up abound, suggesting that providing a woman with financial help is, in theory, a direct, efficient way to get aid to large numbers of those who need it.

Linking gender equality with economic growth is particularly attractive at a moment when cuts are putting governmental and independent aid agencies under great pressure to provide new approaches to development issues. The economic case for supporting girls is indeed bringing together unexpected allies: arguments about the practical benefits of gender equality have helped to garner support across parties in donor countries like Ireland and Spain; and at the French Assemblée Nationale this month, parliamentarians from around the globe came together in advance of the imminent G8 summit to call for a special focus on the 600 million girls and young women in developing countries around the world.

Eqality: giving women financial autonomy

Indeed, it’s an agenda that has great appeal and shows little sign of losing steam. But do the numbers add up? Does ‘investment’ in women mean increased returns for the family and for society? What is lost, and what is compromised in the process?

Adding It All Up…

The new fashion of funnelling aid into projects for women is not without its critics. Some say that projects like these, in regarding women’s labour as a panacea to poverty problems, oversimplify important macroeconomic issues and overlook potentially significant knock-on effects for women.

One concern is that these programmes will take precedence over longer-term strategies to address the deep-seated power relations that cause women to be impoverished in the first place – a problem of giving a (wo)man a proverbial fish. Also, in pursuing gender equality not as an end in itself but as a means to economic growth, these programmes in essence put the health of the economy over the wellbeing of women. Rather than remedial, this may be a detriment to the situation of many women if certain extraneous factors are not kept in check. For example, human rights and labour conditions may be disregarded in efforts to simply get women working, putting upon women the ‘double burden’ of both household work and of wealth creation. It is also argued that by upsetting cultural norms, giving women some financial autonomy could even expose women to a greater risk of domestic violence, as Aid Watchers’ guest blogger Anna Carella points out.

So is seeing women as a crucial part in solving the world’s worst poverty and health traps a net positive or negative for women? Women are clearly not ‘investments’ in the same sense that green technologies or tractors are. It is unreasonable and perhaps disingenuous to expect that putting money into women’s education, microcredit schemes and will produce the significant and neatly quantifiable economic outputs aimed at – and certainly not without some unintended consequences. A broader spectrum of related issues, like labour standards and social pressures, must be brought into the equation in earnest to ensure that this new trend works to develop rather than detriment the capacities of women and girls.