The world will not meet its poverty reduction targets by 2015 unless it steps up its commitment to provide health, education and sanitation to the very poor, a World Bank development expert said on Thursday.
The targets, agreed just four years ago and designed to be hit in 11 years' time, are already starting to become unreachable, Stephen Commins, senior human development specialist at the World Bank, said in an interview.
Rather than relying just on economic growth to cut poverty, the world must find imaginative solutions to the problems afflicting its poor, he said.
"Even if the different regions of the world achieve projected optimum levels of growth...the Millennium Development Goals for education, health and sanitation will not be met," Commins said.
"The reason is that economic growth alone will not provide the solution."
The goals, agreed at a summit of world leaders in New York in September 2000, commit the world to reaching a series of goals by 2015, including halving the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day and reducing the infant mortality rate by two-thirds.
They also include cutting the number of women dying in childbirth by three-quarters, halting and beginning to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water.
But Commins is not alone in questioning whether the goals will be met.
Most of the world's richest donor countries, including the United States and most European Union nations, regularly fail to meet their overseas aid pledges, while economists say too many developing countries do not use aid efficiently.
"Services as they exist now in the developing world are failing poor people," Commins said.
Speaking in Ireland, which holds the rotating European Union presidency, he said the EU had given a "very positive response" to World Bank proposals to relieve poverty.
But he urged EU development ministers, due to meet in Dublin on June 1, to speak with "a stronger common voice on development issues and the millennium goals".
The World Bank's World Development Report for 2004 spells out a number of ways in which the Washington-based organisation believes developing countries can tackle poverty, often through "carrot and stick" projects which cost very little.
It describes, for example, the success of a project in Mexico that gives money to poor households if they visit a medical clinic regularly and if their children attend school.
In Bangladesh, it highlights a scholarship programme which pays schools based on the number of pupils they enrol.
"This is as much about sensible use of the resources we already have as it is about raising additional funding," Commins said.
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