Week 10 Journal

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Week 10 Journal

“Garbage ain’t collected, women ain’t protected

Politicians using people, they’ve been abusing

The mafia’s getting bigger, like pollution in the river

And you tell me that this is where it’s at” (Rodriguez, Establishment Blues).

The song Establishment Blues was released by Sixto Rodriguez in 1970, he was

a Hispanic-American whose music became the anthem of the white-middle class

during the downward fall of apartheid in South Africa. His lyrics were

anti-establishment and highlighted social inequalities which seemed to mirror

the increasingly volatile situation in South Africa at the time. What I find

interesting is how these lyrics seem to foreshadow similar concerns addressed

by the UN with the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The MDGs are eight

development goals, with eighteen associated targets and forty-eight indicators

to gauge the progress towards the goals; they were adopted by the UN General

Assembly 18 September 2000 (Rigg, 30). All of the goals are admirable pursuits,

however ambitious they may be, and very few would disagree with striving

towards things such as eradicating extreme hunger and poverty (goal one),

reducing child mortality (goal four) and combating HIV/AIDS (goal six). But

where most critique for the goals is in how these goals are measured, whether

the targets set adequately asses the goals, and what mechanisms (or lack there

of) there are to support these goals (Rigg, 33). Our lively classroom debate

gave us the opportunity to consider and critique the MDGs, which gave us an

opportunity to engage with different aspects of this universal development

pursuit.

The

goal that I was dealing with was goal four: reducing child mortality. I was

offering the negative critique of this MDG, which proved difficult at the time

because the overwhelming majority of statistics and information I found was

that the goal was being achieved or coming considerably close almost

universally. To relate this weeks topic to my personal case study, South

Africa, I researched the application of the MDG goal four in the country. The

aim of reducing childhood mortality reflects the availability and efficiency of

a countries health care system (Republic

of South Africa Millennium Development Goals, 61). The South African

government recently put in place an initiative called “the Negotiated Service Delivery Agreement

(NSDA)” which was a campaign for improving maternal, newborn, child and women’s

health (Republic of South Africa

Millennium Development Goals, 61). One of the main way that South Africa

was reducing childhood mortality rates was by preventing mother-to-child

transmission of HIV (MTCT rate), which was reduced to 2.7% by 2011 and has

continued to lower (Republic of South

Africa Millennium Development Goals, 62). This analyses of South Africa’s

MDG 4, emphasizes the interconnectedness of many of the goals, for many goals

especially involving health care, to reduce one you must reduce them all. This

inter-reliance of goals was another source of negative critique, but I feel

that this interconnection is inevitable because without this relation they

couldn’t truly be as ambitious as they are. All areas of human life are

interconnected, and this inevitable connection is what emphasizes the human

focus that the Millennium Development Goals have.

Works Cited:

Millennium Development

Goals Country Report 2013. 5 ed. Republic of South Africa,

2013.

Print.

Rigg, Jonathon. "The

Millennium Development Goals". The Companion

to Development Studies. Ed.

Vandana Desai and Robert B.

Potter. 2 ed. London: Hodder Arnold Group, 2008. 30-37. Print.

Rodriguez, Sixto. “Establishment Blues”. Cold Facts. Coffey, Theodore. 1970.

A&M

Records.

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