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The MDGs are standardizations of goals to achieve in developing countries seeking to have a good economic and social standard in the societies all over the world. They were established in the year 2000 for world leaders as a challenge for the year 2015, and they cover 8 specific areas, trying to reduce the poverty and hunger, improve the education and the gender issue, enhance the maternal and population health, reduce the child mortality, control the environmental degradation and ensure the development ability. Each goal has its own characteristics, targets and indexes, some more discussable than others, but I am not going to point out that now.
Many developing countries accepted these targets to work on them during these 15 years, not only trying to achieve them, but also having a public-international report about them, which is published in the webpage of the MDG (www.mdgmonitor.org).
Today in classes of Development Planning, in a big room with people of many different countries, we started to review the progress of some of them. Of course that I was waiting for Chile, but instead of it, Brazil was the next. At the time we saw the overview of the goals, everybody was very impressive about how good they were going, with the half of them already achieved. However, everybody started to question if the statics were alright, and even more with the opinion of a Brazilian girl who put in doubt many of what it says.
After my class, the first thing that I did was to come to the computer and see the status of Chile, and surprisingly the graph showed an overview no as good as the Brazilian one. So, looking further I saw that Chile has better specific indexes than Brazil in most of the goals, in contrast with the first and striking static.
I don’t have any doubt about which of both way to see the monitoring I believe to –and not because the idea of think that my country “is better” that other, and please don’t take this example as a “duel” against Brazil because is not at all, it is just a comparison-, but the fact that the statics showed here have different “results” makes me question a lot about how do we measure and compare subjects about development. Because even when we try to establish standards through indexes, if at the moment to translate those indexes the perspective is not the same, it doesn’t worth.
Now we have a triple work when we find results: pay attention in the source of the information, in the indexes and in who and how those indexes are interpreted. The Millennium Development Goals seem to me a good strategy to push the change for better conditions and the monitoring of them result interesting due to revel the enforce of the governments to meet them. However, we have to be aware even with this global and important material about the objectivity of this information, even though there suppose to be support in the countries’ monitoring from the UN Development Programme.
