2013-05-24T12:37:33-04:00 John W. McArthur http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=john-w-mcarthur Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for John W. McArthur Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.818862 2011-02-04T14:56:11-05:00 2011-05-25T18:30:24-04:00

John W. McArthur http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-mcarthur/
This year was the third time that I have attended Davos, and each time the experience has been quite distinct. In 2005 I attended as a staffer in my then-UN capacity, just weeks after the Asian tsunami and 10 days following the release of the UN Millennium Project's final report, Investing in Development. Poverty and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were at the top of everyone's agenda, including politicians like then-Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroeder and likewise celebrity attendees like Bono, Angelina Jolie, Richard Gere, Sharon Stone, and Chris Tucker.
I returned to Davos five years later, in 2010, as CEO of Millennium Promise, a non-governmental organization (NGO) focused on the MDGs. The meeting atmosphere was reserved as the world emerged from the shocks of the global economic crisis. By then I was invited to participate as a member of a group the Forum has been generous enough to designate as Young Global Leaders (YGLs), an initiative that brings together publicly-minded people from business, government, academia and non-profit sectors to learn from each other through regular collaborations over a five year period. For non-profit representatives like myself, the Forum waives its conference fees and encourages us to make the most of the opportunities to connect, brainstorm, and problem-solve with representatives from all sectors around the globe.

In the lead up to last year's Davos events I worked with Johann Koss, Olympic champion and CEO of the NGO Right to Play, and dozens of other members of the YGL community to launch a new initiative through which private individuals and organizations could make their own targeted, time-bound, and measurable pledges to support the achievement of the MDGs. Economists like Esther Duflo and Kristin Forbes of MIT joined with Michael Kremer of Harvard to make an MDG deworming pledge. Zainab Salbi of Women for Women made an MDG pledge, as did Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and many other leaders in their respective fields. The Forum's YGL initiative made this entire effort possible, and all of the pledges are publicly registered on www.mdgpledges.org, which also now partners with the UN Foundation.

This year in 2011, Davos brought many memorable moments. The press reports generally focused on the cautious optimism of the politicians and the regulatory concerns of the business leaders. But there are so many parallel conversation streams within Davos that everyone forms their own narrative. For me, a highlight in the formal program came when Bill Clinton described the MDGs as a non-optional part of the long-term US economic strategy. Another was to watch David Cameron's political mastery as he conducted a roving Q&A with a plenary room as if it were a local town hall. Many reported the playing of Aung San Suu Kyi's taped message as a highpoint, although unfortunately I wasn't there to see it in the moment. On the sides of the meeting, it was invigorating to see the modernizing social network influences on this remote Swiss conference center as Twitter feeds streamed everywhere and Facebook's Randi Zuckerburg webcasted a constant stream of live interviews with personalities ranging from Nick Kristof of the New York Times, to Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace, to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Meanwhile, YGL friends were very pleased to present the first annual report on the MDG Pledges, and to launch the new website that makes it possible for any organization or individual to register their own MDG pledge.

Amidst the ebb and flow of events, Davos is a rare moment to connect a rapid succession of informal meetings with leaders from the public, private and non-profit sectors. My own schedule included a breakfast with Paul Kagame, Tony Blair, Michael Porter and major CEOs discussing new foreign investment opportunities in Rwanda. There was the conversation on expanding agricultural credit facilities with a senior African policy maker; then the technology brainstorm with a Silicon Valley leader around a global graduate degree program I help coordinate; then a discussion with an eminent philanthropist on how new technology can foster more collaborative problem-solving between the world's richest and poorest communities; followed by a strategy session with one of Mozambique's leading civil society voices on how to empower citizens' debates around the MDGs. Each of these conversations was inspiring in its own way. Together they afford a patchwork view of how various global conversations could better thread together through concerted efforts.

There is a broad understanding that many people of influence and wealth gather in Davos every year to discuss topics of mutual interest. This is fair enough in a free associating society where private companies pay membership dues to attend a major meeting and keep the trains running. At the same time, there should be greater understanding that large numbers of people with enormous goodwill and much-deserved moral influence convene in Davos every year to identify new ways to collaborate and discuss topics of global public concern. With access comes responsibility to speak on behalf of those without. Perhaps contrary to popular imagination, Davos convenes large numbers of people who live that responsibility every day. I know because I had the privilege to meet many of them last week. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.813796 2011-01-25T15:38:07-05:00 2011-05-25T18:25:24-04:00

John W. McArthur http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-mcarthur/
Far away from the conference centers, the pace of technological innovation continues unabated. Hundreds of millions more people are getting access to mobile phones and the Internet every year, and social networking entrepreneurs are finding new and exciting ways every day for all of those people to connect at personal, professional, and humanitarian levels. The unprecedented ability of geographically diffuse communities to link and act around common interests marks one of the great transformations of our time.

But the inevitable focus on navigating new global sources of influence and power cannot be left to overshadow the persistent challenges faced by the world's poorest and least influential people -- the ones whom the world has spent 10 years promising to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to cut extreme poverty in its many forms by half by 2015. With roughly one fifth of humanity still living on less than $1/day, the global community must take advantage of the latest tools available to fulfill its commitments.

To that end, a year ago more than 60 members of the World Economic Forum's community of Young Global Leaders made public pledges at the Forum's Annual Meeting Davos, committing their own private individual and organizational efforts to time-bound, quantified and practical initiatives that can help achieve the MDGs. This week, at the 2011 annual meeting, the MDG Pledges initiative is launching its first major progress report, which is also posted on www.mdgpledges.org.

Over the past year, many MDG pledges have made exciting progress. For example, Veronica Colondam and the YCAB Foundation have helped to educate more than 2,700 school drop outs in Indonesia. Leading economists Esther Duflo, Kristin Forbes, Michael Kremer, and Vikram Akula, through Deworm the World, have dewormed more than 3 million children. Zainab Salbi and Women for Women International have supported nearly 43,000 women survivors of war across a range of developing countries. James Kondo and Table for Two have helped to deliver approximately 6 million school meals in Africa. And at a person-to-person scale, Alec Oxenford and the Germinare Foundation have helped two students receive a full scholarship that will enable them to complete both primary and secondary school.

These pledges reflect the spirit of the Millennium Developing Goals, one in which everyone must make their best effort to contribute however they can. The pledges are not a supplement for government action. They are an invitation to other individuals and organizations to make their own pledges for the goals, and to register them publicly on www.mdgpledges.org. More than anything, they are indicative of how far and fast an interconnected global community can move forward together, when individuals and organizations decide to collaborate in tackling the world's most pressing challenges.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.735651 2010-09-22T17:42:28-04:00 2011-05-25T17:50:22-04:00

John W. McArthur http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-mcarthur/
- Johann Olav Koss & John W McArthur

***

This week world leaders are gathering at the United Nations for the last major check-point summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) before the 2015 deadline. The Goals were set by world leaders a decade ago at the Millennium Summit, and they have spurred great progress in tackling the challenges of extreme poverty around the world. Bill Gates has called them "the best idea for focusing the world on fighting global poverty that [he has] ever seen."

At this important juncture, we call on world leaders to fulfill their MDG commitments through clear, practical, targeted, and measurable initiatives, matched by clear points of accountability and transparency for ensuring successes and challenges can be understood by all. At the same time, we recognize that the MDGs require leadership from all segments of the global community, not just governments. The world is ever more interconnected, and ever more able to leverage the ingenuity and efforts of individuals, companies, and non-governmental organizations from all corners of the globe in tackling the challenges of extreme poverty.

Recognizing the opportunity and responsibility that everyone has to contribute to the Goals, we have all agreed to make our own practical, measurable, and time-bound MDG pledges -- whether through direct implementation, public advocacy, or the mobilization of financial support. These pledges are not a substitute for government action, but we hope they will make real contributions to the achievement of the Goals. Moreover, we hope that our range of pledges, from small to large, will help spur others to make their own MDG pledges. Such commitments can be particularly important in spurring momentum amidst global sentiments of economic strain.

Our MDG pledges are all published on the new website www.mdgpledges.org . We encourage others around the world to join this public registry by making their own MDG pledges, and in turn sharing them with members of their community and encouraging friends and colleagues to do the same. With five years to go, we pledge our own best efforts to work with communities around the world to help ensure the MDGs are achieved.

Signed,

Alberto C. Vollmer
Andy Freire
Ayla Goksel
Francois P Champagne
Daniel Lubetzky
David McWilliams
Esther Duflo (Director, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab)
Jennifer Corriero (Co-Founder, TakingItGlobal)
Jo Cox (Director Maternal Mortality Campaign)
Johann Koss (President and CEO, Right To Play)
John Battelle
John W McArthur (CEO, Millennium Promise Alliance)
Kate Roberts (Vice President, PSI)
Kristin J Forbes (Professor, MIT-Sloan School of Management
Mack Gill (President, SunGard Global Services)
Marco De La Rosa (CEO, AES Dominicana)
Michael Kremer (Professor of Economics, Harvard University)
Mina Al-Oraibi
Muna AbuSulayman (Secretary General, Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation)
Nancy Lublin (CEO, DoSomething.org)
Henrik Naujoks
Nikolay Pryanishnikov
Orzala Ashraf Nemat
Patrick McWhinney
Salimah Y Ebrahim
Vuyo Jack (Africa Empowered)

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.594982 2010-05-30T20:24:14-04:00 2011-10-24T14:31:44-04:00

John W. McArthur http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-mcarthur/ Harvests of Development in Rural Africa. As the Secretary-General said upon receiving the report, "It is a case study in what is possible, even in the poorest of places in the world."

The Millennium Village data indeed show remarkable results across the first five reporting sites in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. Average maize crop yields nearly tripled. Anti-malaria bednet usage increased sevenfold, helping average malaria prevalence plummet from approximately one in four people infected to one in ten. Chronic malnourishment dropped from fully half of children under 2 years old being stunted to just a third. The average share of populations with access to improved drinking water soared from 20 percent to 72 percent, while access to basic sanitation jumped from 6 percent to 42 percent.

While these average "quick win" figures are compelling, each Millennium Village community and local partnership team recorded spectacular gains in key areas, too. Mwandama in Malawi had nearly a sixfold increase in maize yields compared to pre-project levels. Sauri in Kenya saw a spectacular decline in malaria prevalence, dropping from nearly half of local residents infected to merely 1 in 12. Pampaida in Nigeria transformed from having effectively no one with access to improved drinking water to more than 70 percent having access. Ruhiira in Uganda jumped from only 4 percent of residents having access to sanitation to, again, more than 70 percent access. Bonsaaso in Ghana saw major leaps in health services, more than doubling the percentage of birth deliveries accompanied by a skilled attendant, from 30 percent to 61 percent.

There are many key points to extract from the results. First, the data serve as testimony to the efficacy of low-cost, locally-led, integrated, community-focused development programs across a wide range of impoverished and challenging rural environments. The five Millennium Village sites described in this report represent a highly varied cross-section of farming systems, topographies, community governance structures, and local burdens of disease. The project is still in its early days, and each site has its own unique blend of successes and challenges, but the common theme of rapid progress across sectors and sites is an important policy lesson on the viability of achieving the MDGs by their 2015 deadline.

Second, the project's budget for activities spanning agriculture, health, education, infrastructure, and business development has been very modest, at $120 per community member per year, with only half the resources coming from the MVP donor budgets and the other half coming from the national government, community members, and other partners. Although the precise cost numbers are still being analyzed, the sites all look to have been achieving their gains by operating well within the $120 total budget in the first three years. No one can reasonably say that these costs are high compared to the human value they are creating.

Third, in the weeks leading up to the June G8 and G20 summits in Canada, the project's low per capita cost is a timely reminder of the consequences of the G8 not holding itself accountable on its foremost global development promises for 2010. In 2005 the G8 leaders promised to double aid to Africa by this year. This works out to $80-100 per African annually. If it had come true, there would now be enough aggregate resources available for every village in Africa to be a Millennium Village. Instead the G8 stands about $20 billion behind its commitments as it enters a summit where the host Canadian government plans to focus on "accountability."

Fourth, the results underscore the need to translate the MDGs into a plan of action that addresses the needs of every community, district, and country that seeks to achieve them. Today Secretary-General Ban called on, "every country to look closely at [the Millennium Villages'] success." It is essential to maintain the focus on practicality. Last fall President Obama called for the September 2010 MDG Summit at the UN to adopt an action plan for the Goals. This will be a critical opportunity to map out the scaling mechanisms to meet the integrated needs of all rural villages around Africa.

The new data are of course only preliminary and reflect early results for a broader 10-year project. Much work remains to be done to move beyond quick wins and support the growth of local sustainable systems. More interim data are slated for release later this year, including through peer-reviewed scientific publications. Forthcoming evidence will review progress in the other program sites and comparison villages. Nonetheless, many of the newly released data are breathtaking enough on their own that the respective village communities and local teams deserve huge praise. Their work underscores the tremendous results that can be achieved through a holistic approach to community-based development. As world leaders prepare to gather at upcoming G8, G20, and UN summits, we need to help them ensure all communities around rural Africa start to receive similar support, and achieve similar gains.

***Author's note: Some readers of this blog misinterpreted the Harvests of Development document as a formal project evaluation, although the report's text is clear in describing it otherwise. To help avoid any residual confusion, the word "scientific" (before "report") has been removed from the original version of this blog post. Apologies for any inadvertent misunderstandings on this point!

John McArthur is CEO of Millennium Promise (http://www.millenniumpromise.org) and teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He co-chaired the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice, which was supported by the MacArthur Foundation and hosted by the Earth Institute at Columbia University. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.579435 2010-05-17T18:30:14-04:00 2011-05-25T16:30:24-04:00

John W. McArthur http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-mcarthur/
There are several noteworthy lessons and trends to glean from this initiative. One is that private foundations still have an extraordinary capacity to support innovation around the world, and to create significant new public goods in the process. The idea of an MDP degree was recommended in late 2008 by a foundation-supported international commission composed of eminent practitioners and academics across a range of development fields. The commission included former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo; global health leaders Helene Gayle, Jim Kim, and Jeffrey Koplan; former UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman; Nobel laureate RK Pachauri; path-breaking ecologist Virgilio Viana; prominent agronomists Freddie Kwesiga and Alice Pell; and African academic leaders Goolam Mohamedbhai and Livingstone Luboobi.

It is remarkable that, less than two years later, more than 20 schools have committed to launching programs that will train students with core MDP skills spanning health science, natural science, social science, and management. The first program started this past year at Columbia University, where the initial cohort of students is extremely impressive and motivated. Within another two years, and less than four years after the commission published its recommendations, the network of programs will be training at least several hundred students annually around the world. Highly skilled MDP graduates will be newly empowered to work with specialists from a variety of disciplines and to identify ways to draw insights from those specialists for both policy and practice.

Importantly, the programs are set to take shape through a highly collaborative academic network, one in which member universities share curricular resources with one another and pursue joint classes to ensure each institution in the network has access to the best elements throughout the network. I do not know of any other case where either a significant new type of degree program, or a collaborative global network of degree programs, has been launched with such speed by so many academic institutions around the world.

Another interesting dynamic is the significant curricular diversity that will be taking shape as the basic MDP frameworks are applied across the network. The universities will inherently approach sustainable development challenges through a range of academic, geographic, and practical perspectives, as can only be the case across campuses ranging from Bangladesh to Brazil and Senegal to Sri Lanka. But they will also approach the MDP topics through a highly diverse set of curricular emphases. The University of Winnipeg, for example, will focus on the special challenges of indigenous populations. Meanwhile the University of California at Davis will draw from its longstanding leadership in agriculture and environmental science.

Perhaps the most noteworthy trend around this initiative is its depth of global interest and support. The cross-section of 20 institutions supported by the MacArthur Foundation represents only a sliver of the universities that want to participate. When the foundation issued a request for MDP proposals, well over 100 universities around the world submitted formal letters of interest. This suggests that the initiative was tapping into a vast latent demand for a less siloed approach to professional training for sustainable development − one that draws much more systematically on scientific insights as key inputs to policy and practice. Hopefully the dozens of other institutions keen to launch MDP programs will also be able to do so soon.

MDP programs around the world are poised to make important contributions to the training of future practitioner leaders in sustainable development. The MacArthur Foundation deserves great credit for its vision in supporting this effort and for the speed with which it has carried it through. More broadly, we can all take inspiration from the important lessons the initiative provides on how strategic philanthropy and a collaborative approach to global institutional innovation can form new trends in the years to come.

John McArthur is CEO of Millennium Promise (http://www.millenniumpromise.org) and teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He co-chaired the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice, which was supported by the MacArthur Foundation and hosted by the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.497120 2010-03-12T14:56:41-05:00 2011-05-25T15:50:25-04:00

John W. McArthur http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-mcarthur/ article by Jeffrey Gettleman highlights the community's remarkable progress in food security, education, health, and income-generation. Crucially, these integrated gains towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been achieved through a very modest budget, with only $60 per person of total annual project expenditures and the same amount of community, government and partner expenditures.

But one of the most important lessons of the Millennium Villages project is that the gains are taking place far beyond the first program site in Sauri. Today, the Millennium Villages reach nearly 500,000 people across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and the partner communities in each country are registering a cross-section of major improvements. Later this spring the Millennium Villages project will present a report with 3-year benchmark data for several sites. This will complement data from comparison villages that are slated to be reported later this year, along with some key scientific publications.

These results form a critical reference point in the global policy discussions of 2010. In September the UN will host the last major 5-year checkpoint summit on the Millennium Development Goals. President Obama has announced his intent for an "action plan" to be agreed at this summit. Before then the G8 and G20 will meet in Canada in June, as the world's new leading forum among economic powers. Hundreds of corporate leaders from around the world will come together at the UN Global Compact's summit the same month.

In each of these venues, the focus must be practical: how to leverage simple technologies to scale up the success stories that already exist? Less than a decade ago the world shifted its focus from whether to scale up support for poor people's AIDS treatment to how to scale it up. In the past couple of years a similar shift of logic took hold for supporting smallholder agriculture, and even for malaria control.

Today an analogous breakthrough is needed for scaling up not just single interventions or sector programs, but integrated interventions that span sector programs. Every community needs adequate food alongside functioning schools, clinics, community health workers, water points, roads, and bank accounts. Why pretend to choose one as more important than another? Each village in extreme poverty has the right to set its own holistic action plan for achieving the MDGs.

Many specific Millennium Village activities have already seen tremendous scale-up success since the project started four years ago. As one of the most important examples, Malawi has doubled its national food production through basic support to farmers. Now the goal is to support countries to scale-up an integrated approach. The Government of Mali has drawn from the early program success to craft a national plan targeting 2 million people in the country's 166 most food insecure communes. The Government of Nigeria has committed to using its debt-relief funds to scale integrated community-based approaches to 20 million people.

The Millennium Villages are empowering communities, increasing demand for well-functioning public services, and providing a powerful example of how an integrated approach to community-based development can succeed. It is time to gather our practical minds to say: if a small group can work with half a million people to achieve those successes in just a few years, what can each of us do to support the other hundreds of millions of people who deserve the same chance at success?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.440634 2010-01-28T14:11:22-05:00 2011-05-25T15:20:23-04:00

John W. McArthur http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-mcarthur/
Government leaders cannot solve global challenges on their own any more. In today's much flatter world, it is everyday people --and, critically, their personal networks--who have the potential to be the world's big new problem solvers. Haiti's post-earthquake emergency has vividly displayed the need for coordinated best efforts from non-profits, companies, individuals, online communities, governments and the UN system. The same mindset of partnership, urgency, and "all hands on deck" is also required to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the world's integrated targets for tackling extreme poverty by 2015.

The crisis in Haiti underlines the deep truth that life remains horrendously fragile in societies that lack the resources and infrastructure to meet basic human needs. For the 1.4 billion people still living in extreme poverty around the world, life and death tragedies remain all too common, whether brought about by a earthquake, drought, flood, or even just the simple bite of a mosquito. More than 8 million children will die this year before reaching their fifth birthday, most because they are too poor to stay alive.

In his September 2009 opening address to the UN General Assembly, President Barack Obama announced a new approach to the global challenge, with a countdown to the Millennium Development Goal summit that will take place at the United Nations in September 2010. This will be the last major opportunity for governments to put in place a coherent plan for achieving the Goals in time for the 2015 deadline. The President stated unequivocally that the United States "will support the Millennium Development Goals, and approach next year's Summit with a global plan to make them a reality."

The Millennium Goals are the world's goals. They have spurred an unprecedented global agenda for partnership since they were established 10 years ago. Bill Gates has called them "the best idea for focusing the world on fighting global poverty that [he has] ever seen." They have seen remarkable progress, including a 74 percent reduction in measles deaths, 4 million people on life-saving AIDS treatment, and more than 30 million additional children in primary school in Africa alone. The success stories each have major lessons for scale-up, including sound technical interventions, institutional mechanisms to deliver services, adequate finance to reach scale, and a clear focus on metrics. Ten years ago most were widely considered unachievable.

In 2010, global policy agreements are crucial, but they are no longer enough. Some government commitments are becoming tough to respect in any case. The G7 rich countries alone are now more than $30 billion behind on their high profile 2005 Gleneagles promises to the developed world.

The Goals need action from everyone. In that spirit, this week a group of more than 50 private individuals and organizations around the world are making their own pledges to help make concrete progress. These pledges will be announced at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and are being made by people the Forum has designated "young global leaders." The group strives to show that the Goals require shared ownership, with everyone doing what they can to leverage available skills, technologies and networks to contribute towards the core targets.

Pledges vary in size and include effort to deliver services directly, mobilize funding, or raise public awareness. They embody the spirit that everyone has something to contribute. One person is launching a school that will teach 250 girls in Afghanistan. Another is supporting the reclamation of Indonesian land in support of the Goal for biodiversity. Accion International will expand financial services to 500,000 microentrepreneurs in India. Deworm the World has committed to deworm 10-20 million children in 2010 to support the Goals for education and child health. Facebook's leadership has pledged an innovative strategy to connect 20 million people with organizations supporting the Goals for gender equality. The pioneering African Leadership Academy will mobilize its students around the Goal for environmental sustainability.

These pledges can only be a beginning. In the coming weeks the initiative plans to launch a public mechanism through which companies, organizations, individuals, and governments can announce and register their own concrete MDG commitments. The aim is to leverage pledges in a manner that builds public awareness of the Goals and also supports the adoption of a robust intergovernmental action plan at the September 2010 UN summit.

Individuals, companies, and non-governmental organizations need to stand alongside their governments to advance the best solutions to extreme poverty, to sustain public engagement, and to hold their governments accountable. The Goals are too important to wait on politics. World leaders urgently need our help. It is time for a people's plan of action.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.230538 2009-07-13T10:20:22-04:00 2011-05-25T13:35:19-04:00

John W. McArthur http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-mcarthur/
Our global coping mechanisms are on a brink. The World Food Program is slashing emergency humanitarian programs amidst a reported $5 billion budget gap. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria faces its own multi-billion dollar gap that will prevent live-saving services from reaching millions of people. The H1N1 virus has officially reached global pandemic proportions, with uncertain implications. Meanwhile climate change proceeds at a quietly relentless pace, straining ecosystems and social systems across the planet.

How to manage the complexity? In the United States, the Obama Administration has been criticized for setting too many priorities at once. Yet the critique of an overcrowded plate overlooks the fundamental challenge of modern public leadership. Today there is no choice but to tackle a multidimensional global agenda. Which among macroeconomic coordination, food production, energy, climate change, or disease control could be considered optional at this stage?

The reality is that problem-solving must now be both multilateral and multisectoral. Even in the United States, the world's richest country by many measures, long term prosperity hinges on concerted progress across health care, education, energy and infrastructure. Foreign policy success will hinge on programs to address global health, agriculture, and climate change. It is far from trivial that budget director Peter Orszag has stressed health care performance as the single biggest priority for America's long term fiscal wellbeing. Nor are the climate-linked agricultural and economic warnings of Energy Secretary Steven Chu to be taken lightly.

The United States' need for multi-sector leadership only parallels the challenge already felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the poorest countries. Consider, for example, the chronic crisis of hunger in sub-Saharan Africa. An understanding of basic agriculture is required to help double stagnant crop yields. Core concepts of environmental science are needed to manage land and migration pressures amidst climate change. Health systems are essential for promoting farmers' productivity. Simple engineering is crucial to irrigation, energy, and transport.

The world of multisectoral multilateralism requires trained professionals at all levels, across all countries, who are able to connect practical problem-solving across specialized disciplines on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, the world does not yet train people for these tasks. Our higher education systems overwhelmingly reward targeted, single discipline studies while so many of the world's most pressing issues require solutions that draw systematically from insights across disciplines. Specialists remain essential but vastly more people should have at least a basic understanding of the spectrum of topics underpinning core global challenges.

This was the conclusion that colleagues and I recently reached through the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and hosted by the Earth Institute at Columbia University. We identified a stark need for scientifically savvy policy generalists, practitioners who can bridge the work of specialists through knowledge of four pillars of sustainable development: natural sciences, health sciences, social sciences and management. In academic jargon, one could say that the commission outlined the need for "science-based policy MBAs."

The Commission recommended a new global form of graduate degree program, a Master's in Development Practice, to train professionals across the four basic pillars, with an emphasis on practical skills and field training. It also recommended that students practice working in networks across borders and time zones as a normal habit, empowered by simple webcams and cheap software.

Last October the Foundation committed a pool of more than $15 million to seeding these new degree programs. In the following two months more than 140 universities submitted formal letters of interest from around the world. On July 1, the Foundation announced its first tranche of support to institutions throughout Australia, Botswana, China, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Senegal, and the United States. Amidst a time of such remarkable global turbulence, it is notable that universities are leading the charge of policy renewal. This might be the first time that a new form of degree program has been launched concurrently in so many corners of the globe.

Today's unanticipated global maelstrom is forcing governments, businesses and citizens to remember our interconnected fragility and purpose. Thinking narrowly about priorities will lead to narrow thinking on solutions. We must recognize the interwoven nature of the global agenda, and move quickly to train the practitioners who will manage the complex course ahead.

John McArthur is the CEO and Executive Director of Millennium Promise. He is based in New York. Follow John on Twitter @johnmca or email him at john.mcarthur@millenniumpromise.org.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.208222 2009-05-27T16:16:09-04:00 2011-05-25T13:25:21-04:00

John W. McArthur http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-mcarthur/ article exposes the confusions that underlie her slashing attacks on aid. Most importantly, she seems to believe that sub-Saharan Africa was economically prosperous and then was pushed into poverty by aid. She makes the following statement: "No surprise, then, that Africa is on the whole worse off today than it was 40 years ago. For example in the 1970's less than 10 percent of Africa's population lived in dire poverty -- today over 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africa lives on less than US$2 a day."

Let's parse that statement for a moment. World Bank researchers Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion prepare the benchmark under-$2-a-day historical headcount data going back to 1981. According to their figures, headcount poverty under $2 a day was 74 percent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa in 1981 and 73 percent in 2005. Other prominent estimates that go back to 1950 or 1970 also contradict Moyo's statement, by showing high and persistent poverty. All of the macroeconomic time series by Maddison, Summers and Heston, and others tell the same story: the majority of Africa's population started out impoverished at the time of national independence in the 1960s and 1970s, and a majority remains impoverished till today.

If we move beyond the GNP and income measures, the enormity of Africa's long-term poverty challenges become even more apparent. As we have documented elsewhere, Africa's literacy, agricultural productivity and urbanization rates were very low in 1970. Rural poverty was pervasive. Africa's road coverage, electrification, rail network, and other infrastructure were sparse at best and typically non-existent in rural areas. Aid did not kill Africa.

Despite the persistence of poverty, many conditions in Africa have in fact improved in recent decades. Child mortality has declined from 229 per 1,000 births in 1970 to 146 per 1,000 births in 2007. Adult literacy has increased from around 27 percent in 1970 to around 62 percent in 2007. Primary school net enrolments have increased from around 53 percent in 1991 to around 70 percent in 2007. Aid has played a helpful role in this. Yet aid was very limited, averaging around $35 per African per year since 1960. Aid has never been properly resourced or targeted for a focused period to end the poverty trap and thereby to break the dependency on aid.

Africa's differences with other regions lie not in aid, but in circumstances and history. Unlike South Asia, for example, Africa has not yet had a Green Revolution of higher food yields, the formative event of India's economic takeoff from the late 1960s. India is a civilization of great river systems and large-scale irrigation, thanks to the Himalayan snowmelt and glacier melt and the annual monsoon rains. Africa is a continent of rain-fed (non-irrigation) agriculture. The original Green Revolution, in which India's food output per land area rose markedly, came in the irrigated systems of Asia, not the rain-fed systems of Africa.

US aid heavily subsidized India's Green Revolution while World Bank opposition to aid for African agriculture from the 1980s until recently played an opposite and adverse role, holding back a similar breakthrough for Africa. It was the absence of aid for African agriculture rather than its presence that cost Africa mightily. And one can go on. Africa's tropical disease burden, heavy concentration of landlocked countries, decline of aid for infrastructure during the 1980s and 1990s, and misguided attempts by Africa's creditors to collect debt servicing under "structural adjustment programs" during the 1980s and 1990s all played their part.

Moyo now campaigns against the kinds of aid that can keep millions of African children from dying or being maimed for a lifetime through the consequences of serious episodes of disease. She advocates cutting the aid that has allowed more than 2 million Africans access to life-saving AIDS treatment, since governments are involved. Almost unimaginably, she opposes the distribution of anti-malaria bed nets for Africa's hundreds of millions of young people on the alleged grounds that it has put bed net producers in Africa out of business. In her own words:

"Finally, with respect to Mr. Sachs' remark that I would see nothing wrong with denying US$10 in aid to an African child for an anti-malarial bed net -- even labeling me as cruel; I say, if working towards a sustainable solution where Africans can make their own anti-malaria bed-nets (thereby creating jobs for Africans and a real chance for continents economic prospects) rather than encouraging all and sundry to dump malaria nets across the continent (which incidentally, put Africans out of business), then I am guilty as charged. Don't forget that the over 60 percent of Africans that are under the age of 24 need jobs not sympathy."

The confusion underlying this remark is staggering. There are hundreds of millions of Africans at risk of a killer disease, around two hundred million cases of the disease, and around 1 million preventable deaths per year, yet Moyo is opposed to urgent help if nets are not produced in Africa. She seems both unmoved by the massive suffering and unaware that Africa has gone from producing exactly zero long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) a few years ago to several million per year now, with thousands of jobs in the local industry, as a result of the demand for nets created by aid for malaria control.

She takes no note of the fact that global aid for malaria control is also training tens of thousands and soon hundred of thousands of rural Africans as community health workers; and seems to be unaware that unchecked malaria has long devastated Africa's economy while malaria control is finally emptying the hospitals, putting mothers and fathers back to work and children back to school, and contributing to the boost in Africa's productivity and economic growth of recent years. She says that if her position against aid for LLINs is deemed to be cruel, then yes, she is "guilty as charged."

Moyo is not offering a reasoned or evidence-based position on aid. Everybody that deals with aid wants to promote financial transparency and market-led growth, not aid dependency. We and others have recommended many successful mechanisms to limit corruption and ensure that aid reaches the recipients, as is happening in the disease-control programs. The purpose of aid should indeed be to break the poverty trap through targeted investments in an African Green Revolution; disease control; children's education; core infrastructure of roads, power, safe drinking water and sanitation, and broadband; and business development, including microfinance and rural diversification among impoverished smallholder farmers.

Moyo wants to cut aid off dramatically, even if that leaves millions to die. African leaders - like President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Dr. Awa Coll-Seck of Roll Back Malaria, and Ministers Charity Ngilu and Beth Mugo of Kenya - have fought for Africa's poor and have used aid to save lives and help economies to prosper. These leaders disagree fundamentally and urgently with Moyo's attacks. They recommend more aid, fully accountable and properly targeted, to meet urgent needs.

Since the record shows that Africa has long been struggling with rural poverty, tropical diseases, illiteracy, and lack of infrastructure, the right solution is to help address these critical needs through transparent and targeted public and private investments. This includes both more aid and more market financing. That combination will indeed ensure that private markets and African entrepreneurship can succeed. ]]>