Development

If you could come up with goals for the world to aspire to over the next 15 years, what would they be? What should we focus on? - See more at: http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2014/12/18/next-millennium-development-goals/#sthash.fBhpCHyM.dpuf

¿Dónde debería enfocar su atención la comunidad mundial en los próximos 15 años? Salud, nutrición y educación pueden parecer prioridades fundamentales obvias pero, sorprendentemente, también hay una buena razón para considerar el acceso a la banda ancha.

In a world prone to fickle media attention to short-term crises, we often neglect to consider a long-term game plan for humanity. But right now the world’s 193 governments are gearing up to set our priorities for the next decade and a half at the United Nations’ annual meeting in September 2015. This is a debate worth having, but almost no one has heard anything about it.

The November/December 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs features a 9 page article by Dr. Lomborg. “Promises to Keep: Crafting Better Development Goals”, highlights the work of the Post-2015 Consensus  and the valuable knowledge the project is injecting into the post-2015 debate.

2 billion people in the world are still malnourished, and more than 800 million suffer from chronic hunger.

Economic research shows that providing adequate nutrition to pre-schoolers is the best way to spend a dollar to do good in the world.

One of the biggest problems affecting the world’s poor is one that few have ever heard about: illicit financial flows. Though such flows cost people in Djibouti, Congo, and Chad more than one-fifth of their incomes every year, they almost never make headlines. With the world preparing to establish the specific targets that will guide global development efforts for the next 15 years, the time to change that is now.
 

What's the best way for the United Nations to help the developing world? Right now, the organisation is in the process of setting its global development agenda for the next 15 years - and the most important thing to do is to set goals which it can actually achieve, and to work out what the best way to spend its money is. Economics may well show the way.

World leaders at the U.N. recently began a yearlong conversation about global goals for the next 15 years. Many will rightly talk about poverty, food, water and the environment. Few will mention energy. Yet we should.

Access to energy is one the most important drivers of development, e.g. improving living standards during the Industrial Revolution to more recently, helping lift 680 million Chinese out of poverty. Currently almost 3 billion people, mostly in Africa and South-east Asia, live without modern energy, instead using wood and dung as a source of fuel.

"Here’s $2.5 trillion. You have 15 years to spend it. How do you distribute this money in a way that will achieve the most good for the world?"

Bjorn Lomborg just did a podcast with Freakonomics on his think tank's "Post-2015" project on the Sustainable Development Goals. It is the podcast for the #1 selling Freakonomics book, a #1-ranked podcast, with more than 5 million monthly downloads.

When we think about the next development agenda, our focus is usually on the goals and targets themselves. But we don’t often think about how much it will take to measure our progress. Clearly this is important, because there’s limited value in setting goals and targets if we can’t measure them because it’s just too costly or difficult to do so.