The MDGs in Myanmar: relevant or redundant?

Abstract

Myanmar is a developing country with significant humanitarian needs. It is therefore a country for which achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) should be a high priority. While exact data are difficult to obtain, Myanmar is performing poorly across most of the MDG targets. This is partly an unintended but direct consequence of the international sanctions and concomitant reduced aid flows into Myanmar. Myanmar receives the lowest level of aid per person of any of the 50 Least Developed Countries, raising the very direct question of whether the MDGs are relevant or achievable in Myanmar. Failure to achieve the MDGs could have serious implications in 2015 on future international funding and on reform programmes in the country. This paper considers how the political goals of the international community negatively impact upon the ability to achieve the MDGs and proposes a way forward by increasing aid and by tailoring the MDGs to the Myanmar context, as several regional neighbours have done.

Keywords:

• Myanmar
• MDGs
• sanctions
• targeting goals

JEL classifications:

• O19
• O53

Notes

1. In 1989, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) changed the official English-language name of the country from ‘The Union of Burma’ to ‘The Union of Myanmar’. The UN and ASEAN have accepted the name change, the EU, including the UK, adopted the clumsy Burma/Myanmar, and Australia and the USA (amongst others) reject the change, in solidarity with Aung San Suu Kyi. For many, either choice of the name is political. This paper would prefer an apolitical position, but adopts the name Myanmar out of pragmatic consideration for the agencies working inside the country.

2. Personal interview with the country director of a major INGO, Yangon, July 2009 (anonymous at the request of the interviewee).

3. WHO (2009) simply lists this figure as <US$1. This $0.66 figure is from the Ministry of Health report Health in Myanmar 2008 (MoH 2008, p. 8) for 2006–2007 expenditure, converted from Kyat into US dollars at the unofficial exchange rate as quoted by The Irrawaddy (http://www.irrawaddy.org) for February 2007. Vicary (2007) puts the figure at $0.09.

4. Personal interview, Yangon, June 2009 (anonymous at the request of interviewee).

5. These views were expressed during a series of 47 structured, qualitative interviews of development professionals working within Myanmar by the first author of this paper in 2009. The interviews were used to investigate the adaptations international development organisations make to their operations and projects in order to achieve effectiveness in Myanmar. While this research is being published (Ware 2010, 2011), these key leaders of international organisations almost uniformly see that the greatest constraints on humanitarian work in Myanmar today are not restrictions coming from the Myanmar government but from the international environment of low aid flows and sanctions in which the country is forced to operate.

6. Personal interview with Dr Mike Griffiths, The Leprosy Mission International, Yangon, June 2009.