Why Local Organizations Are Central To Meeting The Mdgs
Measures to meet most of the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) have to be intensely local or have strong local
components – because, to succeed, they have to change
outcomes in each particular locality, especially for those with the
least income and assets. Most of the MDGs are about improved
outcomes for individuals and households – food security,
adequate incomes, access to schools and health care, secure
homes with adequate provision for water and sanitation,
protection from and treatment for life-threatening diseases.
This requires tens of thousands of more effective local
organizations to provide the relevant services – and to
increase local capacity to cope with social and
environmental change. These organizations are unlikely to
serve poor groups(2) unless these groups have more
influence on service providers, and more voice in local
governments. So meeting the MDGs also requires actively
supporting civil and political rights – for pastoralists, forest
dwellers, scattered rural populations or those living in
farming and fishing villages, small towns and large cities.
Where local governments are ineffective or simply ignore
the needs of poorer groups, organizations formed by the
poor – the landless, “slum” dwellers, smallholders,
pastoralists – often have particular importance, providing
their members with services and more influence.
Perhaps the two greatest failings of development assistance
to date have been that it has provided too little support to
the local organizations that benefit poor groups (including
these groups’ own organizations) and has not checked the
local and extra-local organizations that ignore or impoverish
poor groups. Indeed, most of the local organizations that do
benefit and represent poorer groups are invisible to
...
Please login to view the full essay...