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The Sustainability Indicators Observatory – an IDP program – will be in charge of Pnud’s MDGs Portal, which will post information about Brazilian municipalities

ORBIS – Sustainability Indicators Observatory (Curitiba) teamed up with UNDP – United Nations Development Program and UNICEF – United Nations Children’s Fund to create the MDGs Web Portal. The MDGs Portal, proposed by PNUD, will post information on each and every Brazilian municipality, providing an overall view of the MDGs coverage. This information will provide deeper knowledge of individual local contexts and stimulate social mobilization and capacity-building actions for better and universal quality of life.

“With this kind of support, public and private leaders will be able to mobilize efforts toward the definition of municipal goals and actions, with the purpose of improving the quality of life of their inhabitants”, says Orbis’s executive coordinator, Luciana Brenner. Orbis is an IDP program, supported by the Federation of Industries of the State of Paraná (FIEP) and by the Social Service of Industry (SESI).
 
According to Luciana Brenner, the indicators are critical for identifying the strengths, weaknesses, and needs of a given area. They are also useful as an instrument for public administrators to identify priorities and define policies geared to the real needs of the population, besides measuring the outcome of the intervention and initiatives taken.
 
“The municipal administrators in office, starting in the 2009 and 2012 terms, will be able to rely on the MDGs Portal as a support tool for enhancing the quality of life of the local population and to successfully advance towards sustainability. The MDGs can also be used as a strategy to identify a clear scenario capable of guiding actions and multiply capabilities during their administrations”, adds the coordinator.

“We want the Millennium Development Goals to be achieved in each and every municipality, and not only as an average number among the municipalities of a given region”, states Luciana Brenner. According to her, regional studies have provided a general view of the MDGs all over the national territory and have blatantly exposed the huge contrasts that exist in several parts of the country, pointing to the need of superseding averages. “This is why it is important to have disaggregated information; it makes it easy to monitor the evolution of indicators”, she explains.
 
Millennium Goals – Orbis will monitor the municipal Millennium Indicators. The MDGs were proposed by the UN and adopted by 189 countries in an assembly held in 2000. They are socio-economic goals that take account of income, education, health, sex, and the environment. The contracted deadline to attain the goals is 2015, but in the state of Paraná, the Nós Podemos movement, coordinated by FIEP, has established 2010 as the goals’ deadline.
 
The MDGs Portal will multiply both the interactivity and dissemination of information and experiences related to the Millennium Development Goals, with a local emphasis. In order to facilitate a clearer understanding and analysis of the data, the Portal will provide two ways of accessing information: a simplified one, with reports on the municipalities and brief explanatory texts, and a second, more detailed one, where the user will be able to create maps and tables.
 
Information update will be done by Orbis. Data and indicators are collected from official sources, like IBGE – Brazilian Geography and Statistics Institute; the Ministry of Labor; IPARDES – Economic and Social Development Institute of Paraná; Datasus – the unified national health system’s data base; the Ministries of Health, Education, and others.

History – The work developed by Orbis with indicators started in 2004, when the Observatory began to map the MDGs in the Curitiba Metropolitan Area. Indicators like poverty, illiteracy, children mortality, mother mortality rates, incidence of AIDS, and others.

In 2005, the mapping was extended to cover the rest of the state, with the purpose of exposing more destitute or critical areas deserving of immediate intervention by the public authorities. “What’s most important is that people are given access to information, and that the information is easy to be interpreted and capable of providing greater knowledge of the reality around us”, emphasizes Orbis’s executive director.
 
Objectives and goals
 
Objective 1 – To eradicate hunger and extreme poverty. Goal: to reduce by half the percentage of people with income below the poverty line, and to reduce by half the percentage of those dying from starvation.

Objective 2 – To attain universal elementary schooling. Goal: to ensure that by 2015, all children will attend elementary school.

Objective 3 – To promote sex equality and women’s self-sufficiency. Goal: to eliminate the disparity that exists between the sexes at elementary and middle schools.

Objective 4 –To reduce children mortality. Goal: to reduce children mortality by two thirds, by 2015; particularly the mortality among children with less than five years of age.

Objective 5 – To improve maternal health. Goal: to reduce the maternal mortality rate by three thirds, by 2015.

Objective 6 – To fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other diseases. Goal: to slow down and start reversing the propagation of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, by 2015.

Objective 7 – To assure environmental sustainability. Goal: to reverse the destruction of environmental resources, to reduce by half the number of people who do not have access to safe drinking water, and to improve the lifestyle of 100 million people living in degraded areas.

Objective 8 – To establish a worldwide partnership for development. Goal: to intensify actions in partnership with other social actors for the planet’s sustainability. The challenge is creating a dynamics that will make it possible to involve organizations from the three sectors of society in the design of projects geared to meeting the MDGs.