Say Yes, Autumn 2005: Turkey and the MDGs

UN Resident Coordinator, Jakob Simonsen, talks about the particular challenges that poverty and gender inequality represent in Turkey’s progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the role of the UN Country Team in helping Turkey to achieve them.

It’s very clear that progress with the MDGs in Turkey is not what would be expected of a middle income country -- particularly when it comes to regional and gender disparity and to child and maternal mortality. The indicators aren’t supposed to be as dramatic in comparison to other countries at a similar level of development.

But I think it is important to look at what is happening in Turkey today in terms of economic reform and political stability which does have a positive impact on the country achieving the MDGs.

Although the level of overall progress is acceptable when you look at the aggregate figures, they do not tell the full story. The challenges on all of the MDGs are apparent when you disaggregate the figures by province or in accordance with certain variables such as gender.

To begin with, there is the overriding problem of poverty, although not absolute poverty since Turkey does not have a critical situation in that respect. Yet, according to official statistics, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population are living below the food and non-food poverty line, which shows that poverty is still an issue.

All the statistics indicate a much more challenging situation primarily in rural areas east of the line from Samsun, Ankara, Mersin or Adana, for instance. But you will also see the problem in the pockets of ‘new poverty’ that do not necessarily respect an urban/rural divide -- in the areas around major urban centres such as İstanbul, İzmir, Ankara, Adana and Diyarbakır for example. People move to the big cities because they believe they can find better opportunities there. But the opportunities or the services aren’t there and they cannot apply their skills as a result. So they find it hard to fit in.

The countries that really score on the MDGs indicators are the ones that have given a lot of priority to education over the last thirty years. However, it’s a very long term process and, although it has to be done, I believe that some short term measures to alleviate poverty, that can only be initiated by the state, such as employment generation, are needed.

Employment generation is terribly difficult because you can generate a lot of jobs by pumping money into the economy but very often that has no spin-off or sustainability. There are all the usual issues here, I have to confess, in creating jobs at the lower end, in the small and medium scale enterprises in the type of finance, giving people access to finance, giving them an idea -- especially women -- of what real jobs are.

After poverty, gender and child and maternal mortality are the most significant challenges in Turkey -- at the aggregate level.

The reform process over recent years has emphasised those areas that are important to cover such as girls’ education and health -- encouraging more women to give birth in a more secure environment, for example -- hopefully a clinic -- instead of doing so at home where conditions are uncontrolled and risks of infant and maternal mortality are high.

But we need to be clear that it isn’t just a matter of providing health care and health services because poor people are less inclined to demand health services and that also goes for education: cultural behaviour is, in a way, an impediment on demand for these services. In many ways, this makes the attainment of the MDGs even more complex. It would be much easier if it were just a question of delivering more health clinics or more classrooms, but it’s also important to increase demand. This raises the question of attitudes and behaviour -- awareness creation has to come up in that respect.

Gender empowerment is very much a major issue in Turkey that can be dealt with through policy. The indicators are very poor when it comes to gender equality -- in spite of the fact that the country has had legislation for equal opportunities in place for a long time. The involvement of women in the formal labour market here is still lower than that of most other countries at the same development level.

It’s unacceptable that only 4.2% of members of parliament in a country of Turkey’s level of development are women or that not one provincial mayor is a woman.

Women simply need better access to the labour market in Turkey. They can’t go to work unless services are provided that will allow them to do so without shifting the burden of housework onto another member of the family such as their daughters. A well regulated, functioning system of day care needs to be organised to service this very real need.

But women can’t get into the labour market without a profound cultural change. Again, more attention needs to be given to behaviour. It is clearly atrocious, and a telling indictment of attitudes, that more than 40% of women interviewed can accept their husbands beating them up. And even worse, 60% of the fifteen-to-nineteen-year-olds surveyed agreed with this -- which is more shocking because we tend to look to the younger generation to help effect change. So it’s a chain and the links in the chain are policy; access; culture and behaviour.

It’s also very important for UN agencies to recognise that the MDGs are not at all relevant if they’re only relevant to the UN. We need to have the humility to see where the MDGs fit into current, short term Turkish politics and we need to demonstrate why they are very important for Turkey. It’s our responsibility to build this bridge -- it isn’t the country’s responsibility to build the bridge over to us. We can take that to the next level, not just on the indicators, but also on the policies that the government and Turkey as a country implements and ask ourselves are these policies, to the best of our knowledge, in favour of the MDGs or not?

As we commit to our programme work, everything we do should have a bearing on moving Turkey closer to achieving the MDGs. Programmes should not simply tally with the individual mandate of each organisation but they should also tally with the MDG targets.

In the case of UNICEF, for instance, girls’ education isn’t just about enrolment rates, it’s about raising awareness of health care, what the girls will be doing in the future, what happens when they have their own families? So different UN agencies will surely be involved in achieving that programme’s objectives. In which case, we need to ask what is it that the rest of the UN system does in this field so we can work together for Turkey’s benefit?

It’s the partnership concept -- working together and measuring everything we do in terms of progress towards the MDGs.

Download the Millennium Development Goals Report for Turkey [PDF 2.1MB].

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