The White House unveiled today (June 30) its strategy for meeting the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. Members of the development community said the plan was a welcome move but added that many questions remain unanswered.
The strategy, dubbed “Celebrate, Innovate and Sustain: Toward 2015 and Beyond” details how the U.S. plans to contribute to the ongoing global effort to address some of the developing world’s most pressing concerns and meet the MDGs by 2015.
It puts innovation, sustainability, tracking development outcomes and mutual accountability front and center of the U.S. approach to development. Among the report’s action items are funding for research in health and agriculture, promoting broad-based economic growth as well as women and girl’s empowerment, and improving U.S. and partner countries’ monitoring and evaluation procedures.
The U.S. will push for the four cornerstones of its MDG plan to be included in the outcome document world leaders are expected to sign at the high-level U.N. MDG summit in September. Heads of states and governments, international organization officials and civil society representatives will gather at the U.N. headquarters in New York for the summit to review the world’s progress on meeting the MDG.
Oxfam America, among other groups, appeared to welcome the U.S. MDG action plan.
“The plan for us is a big moment because it fulfills two of the promises that President Obama has made on fighting global poverty,” Oxfam America Director of Aid Effectiveness Gregory Adams told Devex, referring to U.S. President Barack Obama’s promises to adopt the MDGs as U.S. foreign assistance goals and to bring a U.S. MDG plan to the U.N. summit.
But Adams said there is a missing piece to the puzzle.
“What we are still waiting for him to deliver on, there is a third promise, in which he promised a clear policy directive that will talk about more broadly how the U.S. will fight global poverty beyond the MDGs,” he says. “We haven’t seen that.”
Adams said they will continue to press the White House to outline a overall development policy directive, preferably in time for the U.N. summit in September.
The Obama administration has been working on two large-scale development aid strategy papers this year, the State Department’s quadrennial diplomacy and development review and the presidential study directive of U.S. global development policy, spearheaded by the National Security Council. Publication of these reviews has been delayed, reportedly in part because of differences within the administration about the exact direction of U.S. foreign aid reform and especially the role of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
