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With just five years remaining to the 2015 deadline, IPS Africa is examining progress towards Millennium Development Goals across Africa. Through insightful reportage, commentary and analysis from throughout the continent, we are looking at successes and failures in the quest to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and women's empowerment, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and develop a Global Partnership for Development.
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Most countries in Africa are not on course to meet most of the targets set out in the Millennium Development goals, but on the level of policy, the goals have forced African governments to more seriously address their roles in alleviating poverty on the continent compared to past.
Recent correspondence about the Regional Poverty Reduction framework from the Southern African Development Community Secretariat, raised the following question: "Are these the issues the SADC region should be asking to eradicate poverty?"
In South Africa, alcohol has become a socio-economic issue, woven into the very fabric of our social thinking, economic transactions and planning for the future health of our developing society. When used with care and responsibility, its presence is benign and often pleasurable. When used without consciousness, it becomes a personal and social scourge.
Macro-economic analysis confirms that the key driver to Africa’s solid economic growth over the last decade has been trade. But the impact of the global financial crisis has threatened trade. This has been shown by the impasse in the World Trade Organisation Development Round in Doha, Qatar, and fears of increased trade protectionism.
The most well-intentioned efforts to manage the HIV pandemic and lower HIV transmission rates cannot be addressed unless the role played by harmful cultural practices and gender-based violence, particularly violence against women, is being addressed. This is a growing realisation among those implementing programmers and providing services in the humanitarian and developmental sectors.
The prevailing trade paradigm presupposes the existence of equal power relations, of equal access to resources and equal voice in economic agenda setting. The ascendance of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995 as the overarching body has given rise to continued discussions, detailing the historical and structural inequities that prevail unfettered in the current global trading system.
Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) are a worthy list of what must be done in the world as a matter of urgency. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find anyone who does not support those goals. But are the indicators used to measure the MDGs real, or just political smoke and mirrors?