Photo: John Isaac/UNDPThe world is now past the mid-point on the timeline to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 but many countries are lagging behind. To ensure that countries speed up their progress, governments and development partners need to significantly scale up their efforts.

Scaling up MDGs means expanding the scope and extent of public services, increasing capacities of national and local organizations to deliver these services, enhancing policies and improving the way institutions work. It also means replicating what has worked at the community, or pilot project level, throughout the country. Resource constraints as well as the challenges developing countries can face in absorbing aid require that these efforts should be concentrated in the most critical MDG-related sectors, with the intention of producing results in three to five years.

UNDP, in partnership with UN agencies, launched the MDG Scaling Up strategy to focus and strengthen the work of UN Country Teams (UNCTs). With support of UNCTs, countries identify priority MDG areas, design MDG-based plans and implement national and local programmes. UNCTs’ support will be tailored to the country context, such as:

• In low-income countries: implementing nation-wide programmes in one or two sectors such as education, health, agriculture or infrastructure sectors; implementing local development programmes in critical regions.
• In post-conflict countries: identifying and implementing quick-impact initiatives that lay the foundations for development.
• In middle-income countries: implementing new or strengthening existing local development programmes; strengthening social protection programmes to reduce inequality and marginalization.
• In natural resource-rich countries: developing and implementing programmes to diversify their economies.

This strategy is designed to help address capacity constraints in national and local governments in the areas of public administration, financial or human resource management, procurement, logistics, monitoring and evaluation, accessing and coordinating aid and public finance. Gender equality, human rights and environmental sustainability considerations will be built into the foundations of all UNCT efforts to achieve the MDGs.

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