COME September this year, and the United Nations’ member states will debate what should replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) programme when it expires in 2015. The MDGs, instituted in the year 2000 by 189 UN member states, are the highest profile articulation of the internationally-agreed upon development goals.
The UN development agenda set out to address extreme poverty, hunger, health, gender equality, education, environmental sustainability, and global partnership. According to the recently released UN MDG Report-2013 titled ‘Assessing Progress in Africa Towards the Millennium Development Goals, 2013,’ Africa is off-track in five of the goals.
The continent has reportedly failed to meet almost 63 per cent of the goals in the period of 13 years. While the MDGs have demonstrated that, with resolve, the world can jointly rally around a common cause and achieve results, it is no secret that the former MDG dispensation was largely driven on an aid framework! If African states play their proper roles, there would be no need to subscribe to externally-generated development goals.
Africans should, therefore, actively seek to evolve their own agenda that can transform the continent's vast potential — which is locked up in its people and natural resources — into sustainable progress.
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