Nairobi, 15th – 21st FEBRUARY, 2007:- Someone very important will be visiting Africa, specifically 5 countries including Tanzania, Rwanda, Benin, Ghana and Liberia. He is the President of the United States of America. The hassles of hosting a US president are bad enough. His people take over your whole country and make our normally inefficient states go into over drive and our egregious First Ladies and their husbands go into overkill to show their hospitality. We never knew many of them could bend their knees until they were leading cleaning troops across the capitals in preparation for Clinton’s visit in 1998 from Kampala to Accra!

I could not forget seeing resident Museveni being a perfect gentleman with a spread umbrella for Mrs Clinton! In Accra, Jerry Rawlings and Mrs Rawlings went out of their ways for a few hours of stop over. But with Bush it is not just the ridiculous security and obsequious protocol laid on by our Presidents that concerns me. African hospitality knows no bounds. Remember some of our chiefs and Kings were so friendly that they parted with ancestral lands and carted away able bodied young men and women for as little as mirrors, umbrellas and walking sticks! Whatever our rational concerns though, the officials in the five ‘chosen’ countries will be beside themselves to give him a reception he will never forget. To them, it is a major diplomatic and political coup for the President of the US to be visiting their countries. It shows their “ungrateful” citizens how very important these leaders are.

Across Africa, members of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) alliance today welcomed the prioritization of poverty reduction in President Mbeki’s State of the Nation address but warned that there needed to be follow through.

“President Mbeki needs to be mindful of the gap between policy pronouncements and actions on the ground so this is not just more empty hype. He signed onto the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, and so far his obligations to the people of South Africa have not been fulfilled. Current levels of poverty and inequality in South Africa are unacceptable and we want to see a delivery plan to match the rhetoric.” Said Christophe Zoungrana, GCAP Africa Coordinator on behalf of the GCAP African Facilitation Team President Mbeki’s call for a "national war room for a war against poverty”, bringing together government departments, provincial and local administrations as well as NGOs and business, is a step in the right direction.

WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (IPS) - Benchmarks used by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are misrepresentative of the progress made by African countries and contribute to an international stereotype of "African failure", according to a study presented this week at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank.

"You've got this MDG machine that turns African good news into African bad news," said the study's author, William Easterly, a New York University economist and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution's Programme on Global Economy & Development. "Africa has enough problems without international organisations and campaigners downplaying African progress when it happens."

A key point raised by the study is the fact that the United Nations originally established the MDGs as a set of benchmarks to measure global progress -- not the progress of countries or regions, Easterly said. This skews the results of individual countries' development achievements when their progress is measured up against global indicators.

In agreement with these findings is Jan Vandemoortele, a U.N. officer who co-chaired the inter-agency group that compiled the MDGs in 2001.

"[A]ssessing whether progress is 'on track' for meeting the 2015 targets can only be done at the global level," Vandemoortele wrote in a 2007 essay for the U.N. World Institute of Development Economic Research. "It cannot be done for any specific region or particular country because the quantitative targets were set in line with global trends, not on the basic of historical trends for any particular regional or specific country."

Yet this is precisely is how the MDGs have been applied in recent years, said Easterly, who presented his results here Wednesday at a research seminar.

Indeed, U.N. annual reports on progress on the MDGs are offered by region and by country. According to the 2007 U.N. report on Africa and the Millennium Development Goals, "At the midway point between their adoption in 2000 and the 2015 target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, sub-Saharan Africa is not on track to achieve any of the Goals."

This conclusion does not account for the lack of a "level playing field" among disparate countries, Easterly said, insofar as the MDG benchmarks pose a disproportionately higher challenge for poorer nations than for those nations that start with higher development baselines.

According to the study, one example of this lies in the fourth MDG, which focuses on reducing child mortality by two-thirds. This benchmark can pose a daunting challenge to a country that has a baseline rate of 150 deaths per 1,000, as compared with a richer country whose initial rate may lie at 24 deaths per 1,000. The former is faced with the task of reducing its rate by 100 deaths, while the latter needs only to reduce its rate by 16 in order to meet the same two-thirds benchmark.

In addition, the first MDG -- which aims to reduce extreme poverty by 50 percent -- can likewise be much more easily achieved in a country that has a lower percentage of poverty to begin with. Two countries with the same gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate over the same period of time could end up with significantly different percentage reductions in poverty, depending on the original percentage of their populations in poverty, the study said.

Africa's GDP grew at the "eminently respectable" rate of 5.4 percent in 2006, according to the study -- a rate which, were it to be sustained over a 10-year period, would place Africa in the top fifth of all 10-year GDP growth rates in all countries during the period from 1965 to 2005.

Yet world leaders have criticised African countries for falling "far short of the seven percent annual growth that needs to be sustained to make substantial inroads into poverty," as reported by the Africa Progress Panel, a group chaired by Kofi Annan and organised by Tony Blair following the 2005 G8 Summit on Africa.

A growth rate of seven percent, called for by the panel, would place African countries among the top tenth of all 10-year GDP growth rates recorded worldwide since 1965, the study said.

"You're asking Africa to do something that is almost historically unprecedented," Easterly said. "This is a good way to take success and call it failure."

What is needed instead is "a descriptive model of positive change" in Africa, said Michael Clemens, a research fellow at the Centre for Global Development, which co-sponsored Wednesday's research seminar.

Current examples of positive change in African development include not only the region's impressive GDP growth rate in 2006, but also huge improvements in child health over the past 30 to 40 years, according to Charles Kenny, a senior economist at the World Bank.

In the case of the second MDG -- which calls for universal primary and secondary school enrollment by 2015 -- Africa's strides in primary enrollment would be better represented by a percentage enrollment increase, instead of an "absolute" goal, Easterly said. When adjusted to demonstrate percentage change over time, Africa's enrollment rate is rapidly converging with that of other developing countries.

These hidden indicators of progress could be better drawn out if each country or region were able to set its own, customised development goals instead of measuring itself against what were intended to be globally aggregated benchmarks, Vandemoortele pointed out.

Cambodia, for instance, has its own "CDGs" (Cambodia Development Goals), which are a more modest adjustment of the MDGs based on Cambodia's particular circumstances, while Vietnam's VDGs set the bar even higher.

"No stigma should be attached with setting national targets that are less ambitious than the MDGs," Vandemoortele stated.

Still, some experts question whether the current MDGs should be disparaged for using benchmarks that accentuate Africa's weak points, since it is this very type of attention that attracts the most funding for aid.

According to Danny Leipziger, vice president of Poverty Reduction and Economic Management at the World Bank, "The complication is that the MDGs, for better or for worse, have really enabled some aid groups to increase their development packages."

MDGs benchmarks that point to a gloomy forecast for African countries could motivate these aid groups to fund more projects in the region, he said.

Regardless of the outcome, experts such as Easterly worry that the current benchmarks perpetuate a negative image of Africa's development. Measuring the region's progress using these indicators "could have real consequences" in terms of demoralising African leaders and activists and discouraging private investment, he said.

This unintended consequence could do more harm than good -- which is why Easterly is calling for the international community to take a second look at how the MDGs are measured, and to consider factors such as the uneven playing field and customised development goals according to country or region.

A key next step would be to acknowledge that the benchmarks currently in place misrepresent the situation, Easterly said.

"When you're in a hole, the most important thing to do is stop digging," he said.

The World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland has called for renewed commitment to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MGDs), aimed at halving extreme poverty, boosting health and education and further empowering women across the developing world by 2015.

World leaders called for action as the current steps made around the world are not nearly enough to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The secretary general of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, the singer and activist Bono and the multimillionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates are some of the personalities sounding the alarm:

Those goals fixed a 2015 deadline to tackle extreme poverty and improve access to education and healthcare. "Too many nations have fallen behind. We need fresh ideas and fresh approaches. It is unacceptable that one child dies of hunger every day, every five seconds," Ban told a news conference at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

“At least 30 million children will still be out of school in 2015 - most of them in poor, conflict-affected countries," says Simon Cowell, Acting Secretary General of the International Save the Children Alliance. 2015 is the target year for education for all and the Millennium Development Goals, a roadmap for ending poverty by 2015.