DEVELOPMENT: Governments Need To Meet Social Promises, Say NGOs

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, May 28 1996 (IPS) - While governments meet here this week to discuss how well they have followed their commitments to social development, one group of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has completed its assessment — and its findings are bleak.

The first edition of a report, ‘Social Watch’, produced by the Instituto del Tercer Mundo of Uruguay and NOVIB of the Netherlands, with input from many NGOs, contends that only a dozen nations have developed anti-poverty plans they pledged to produce at the March 1995 U.N. Social Summit..

Since the Copenhagen summit, the report claims, some 70 nations — including the United States, Japan, Spain and other developed countries — have fallen behind in fight against infant mortality and poverty.

The report comes out as members of the U.N. Commission for Social Development are meeting to evaluate what progress has been made since last year’s summit.

“The situation is not very bright,” says Jagadananda, a member of India’s Centre for Youth and Social Development. “For the past year, nothing has happened.”

Jagadananda argues, “It’s very easy to make commitments — during the last decade of (U.N.) summits we have had many commitments — but adhering to them is very difficult.”

He notes that when he asked India’s representatives here last week who the government had appointed to take charge of the Social Summit follow-up, no one knew if the appointment had been made.

Jassy Kwesiga, executive secretary of Uganda’s Development Network of Indigenous Voluntary Associations, adds that many governments claim they have few options to improve their social policies quickly.

“We don’t want to pretend that things will happen overnight,” Kwesiga says. “We are also aware of other factors which impinge on national governments — pressure from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), but also from donor governments.”

Gina Vargas, a member of the Peruvian NGO Flora Tristan, agrees, arguing that the imposition of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) by multilateral financial institutions, such as the IMF and World Bank, forces countries to abandon their social commitments.

A group of NGOs monitoring the Commission for Social Development issued a statement this week warning that plans to reduce poverty will be hindered by SAPs, which aim to increase a nation’s international competitiveness through fiscal restraint, deregulation and trade liberalisation.

These policies, the NGOs claimed, “fail to create employment, deepn social inequality and poverty, and thereby feed social disintegration. The impact of these policies falls most heavily on women.”

In Peru, Vargas argues, the adoption of free-market economic polices has sparked the partial privatisation of the nation’s health and education systems. That, in turn, has led to a lack of facilities to serve the health and education needs of the poorest Peruvians.

“People are dying because there is no clear-cut health service on the part of the government,” she says. Moreover, she contends, the harsh structural adjustment measures have placed a quarter of all Peruvians in extreme poverty.

In India, too, structural reforms and the government’s desire to court foreign investors has hurt “the poorest of the poor,” Jagadananda says.

As he notes in his report to Social Watch, the Indian government’s desire to pursue large-scale trade in shrimp farming and aquaculture for export has hurt small-scale fishing, on which many Indians are dependent.

Similarly, he adds, corporate-controlled, industrial agricultural production now threatens the livelihood of small- scale farmers, especially women.

Kwesiga argues in his report that Uganda can be improved best by an investment in basic education. But, he adds, there is very little investment by the government in that sector currently, and as a result 40 percent of Ugandans — and perhaps half of all women — are illiterate.

The NGOs representatives here this week contend that some of these problems may be solved, if groups can hold the governments’ feet to the fire and make the public aware of the official commitments to eradicate poverty. Pressure, they contend, should be put on the IMF and World Bank as well.

“The Commission for Social Development should establish an expert committee to investigate the underlying premises of World Bank and IMF policies, and measure their impact against the criteria established at the Social Summit,” the NGO statement said.

The criteria, the groups added, include whether these institutions in fact create “an enabling environment for economic or social development,” as the Social Summit says they must do.

“We have the hope that, with pressure, things will move,” Kwesiga says.