29/3/2002
Tuberculosis And Education - Judging The Success Of Monterrey 26 March 2002

When asked what he thought of the French Revolution, former Chinese premier, Chou en Lai, is reported to have said that it was too soon to make an assessment. A diplomatic answer, par excellence, even if the story was not apocryphal in the first place. Yet the same kind of answer is being given to assessments about the recent UN World Conference on Financing for Development that closed last week in the Mexican city of Monterrey.

Whether this conference marked a revolution is indeed to early to tell. Certainly the process of obtaining agreement to the final document - the 'Monterrey Consensus'- before the conference had even convened was new.

The purpose was to avoid the unseemly rows that had bedevilled last autumn's anti-racism conference in South Africa. Then disputes over the text of the Conference Declaration had Israel and the United States pulling out of proceedings in high dudgeon.

Finalising the text beforehand at a number of preparatory conferences has the advantage of allowing summiteers to concentrate on questions of implementation. On the other hand as many compromises have to be made in reaching agreement on a common text, accusations of weakness are only to be expected.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was in no doubt. He denied that the Monterrey Consensus was a weak document - it would only become so, he said, if the world failed to implement what has been agreed. "No one.….can feel comfortable, or safe, while so many are suffering or deprived," he said.

A poignant example arises in a just published report from the World Health Organisation (WHO) about tuberculosis. This contagious disease claims two million lives every year - many of them young. It is fundamentally a disease of poverty; 80 per cent of the two million deaths occur in only 22 low income countries. Less than a third of tuberculosis sufferers can obtain access to satisfactory treatment. Yet providing treatment for all victims would cost no more than an additional $300 million dollars, say WHO.

The incentive to provide such treatments is not only a moral one: the growth in travel helps to spread tuberculosis. If the disease can be eradicated, an enormous budgetary burden can be lifted from health services all over the world - not least in rich countries.

The message that the rich countries and their lifestyles are vulnerable to disease, terrorism, environmental degradation, conflict, is one that was slowly percolating before the events of September 11th finally shattered belief in the invincibility of our defences.
Post that black Tuesday it is in full flow.

Few world leaders now doubt the imperative of achieving the targets for world development set two years ago at the Millennium Summit, and which included the halving of the number of people living in absolute poverty by 2015. Nor are there many who doubt the World Bank's assessment that aid levels will need to double if those targets are to be attained. That means an additional $50 billion dollars each year.

At Monterrey world leaders pledged themselves to address where such funding should come from and how it should be delivered. These are vital questions, not least because of the limited, uncertain and capricious nature of much of present world development financing.

Recently it has been Afghanistan that has gripped the attention of international donors. The dollars have flowed, even if never in quite sufficient amounts - UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency, for instance, has said that it has received only $119 million of the $271 million it estimates it needs.

But the result has been that many other aid programmes in other parts of the world - particularly emergency food distribution organised by the World Food Programme - have been hit hard.

In Afghanistan, fresh from celebrating Navroz - the Afghan New Year - schools are re-opening the doors. For the first time in six years, girls are being admitted. UNICEF, the UN children's agency has provided 7,000 tons of learning materials as well as emergency shelters to use as temporary classrooms. Much of this has been paid for by a gift from the Government of Japan, say the agency.

Clearly, this is of crucial importance to developing a stable, prosperous country capable of re-joining the international community on respectable terms. But in the absence of any fundamental growth in resources the cost is to education elsewhere in the world, to equally deserving children in other parts of Africa, Asia, South America.

Even the UN itself, at a time when it is being faced with unprecedented demands on its programmes, is being forced to trim its central budget by some $75 million. And that means cutting programmes according to the UN's most senior budget officer.

So to be judged a success, Monterrey has to stimulate the delivery of new money. What Kofi Annan called its 'clearest and most immediate test.'