THE national election is upon us. Potential presidential candidates are now racing for that critical name recall less than a year before the actual election day.
Vice President Jejomar C. Binay, frontliner in the surveys, has pointed out that experience is what is needed for a successful presidency. On the other hand, Sen. Grace Poe, running second, disputed this, and said that honesty is more important. We are not going to argue for or against their perspectives. There is a much larger campaign that has started for the race to end global misery that should be aligned with our local perspectives.
Amid the varying national agendas, we have seemed to lost track of a commitment we made in 2000 under the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs are eight international development goals that UN member-states committed to achieve by end of 2015. The goals are to eradicate poverty and hunger, universal primary education, gender equality, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and develop a global partnership in development.
In order to measure progress, these goals were designed various indicators to monitor. As a signatory to this commitment, the Philippines has done well in some and remains a laggard in others. As can be noted, many of these goals are basic to human capital formation and national development. They should be implemented with or without any international commitment and achieved by a well-functioning bureaucracy at all levels.
Let us take the case of two indicators where the Philippines will most likely not achieve its targets for 2015: Proportion of students who started Grade 1 and will finish Grade 6 (Elementary Cohort Survival Rate) and Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR), or the number of mothers who died from childbirth. The baseline for Cohort Survival was in 1990, with about 69.7 percent. As of 2013, it has only reached 80.6 percent, when the target for 2015 is 100 percent. Meanwhile, the baseline for MMR is 209 for every 100,000 in 1990, this has actually increased to 221 for every 100,000 in 2011, against the target of 52 for every 100,000 for 2015.
In an MDG Acceleration Workshop for Maternal Mortality Rate, which I participated in April 2014, many of the issues hampering the achievement of these goals are not solely the responsibilities of government agencies in charge of these concerns. For example, providing educational resources, such as school buildings and teachers, will not ensure that students will come to school every school day. The same is true that mothers died from child birth, even when you have health facilities and doctors available for child deliveries. Providing the necessary infrastructure is one thing, but having an overall coordinated mechanism is another. During the workshop, it was identified that about 45 percent of mothers still give birth at home. Many of them reasoned that they lack money for treatment, the facilities are too far from where they live and they need transport.
These reasons will not be different from children who have to go to school every day. These reasons can be interpreted as due to poverty and accessibility. In a chart, it can be seen that poverty and birth deliveries in facilities have negative correlation. Therefore, in order for the system to work and meet these targets, responses cannot be left solely in the hands of agencies concerned. These are cross-cutting issues that can only be responded to through a concerted effort from the national to the local governments.
Connecting this to the global agenda and the coming national elections, these data are saying that beyond the characteristics that candidates are trying to sell are real issues that need to be responded to. As the MDGs are about to close this year, the UN has been working on the post-MDG agenda. In this new campaign, various preparatory activities have already been made leading to what is now known as the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs.
The SDGs will have 17 goals compared to only 8 in the MDGs. However, many of the MDGs will still be part of the SDGs, including these two examples that were presented here. Nonetheless, there will be more indicators to measures and more challenges to be included in the process, with emphasis on combating climate change and building effective and responsible institutions.
From September 25 to 27, 2015, the UN will have a summit to adopt the Post-2015 Global Development Agenda. Soon after that, the country will know who the candidates are for the presidency. The timing is right. What will be the national agendas of the candidates, and how will they relate to the global agenda, particularly, as this post-2015 demands more than the basic—it requires a more specific collaboration from the global to the local in preparing countries from the challenges brought about by natural disasters and will demand an effective responsible governmental system. In short, the global agenda should also be the national agenda for the coming 2016 elections.
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Alvin P. Ang, PhD, is professor of economics and senior fellow of Eagle Watch, the macroeconomic and forecasting unit of the Ateneo de Manila University.