The InterDependent

Will the world be a better place in 2015? Despite varied progress in the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations still faces a steep uphill battle in the poorest areas of the developing world in promoting poverty reduction, health, education and gender equality, with Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa the major blemishes on the goals’ report card.

As the UN holds a summit in New York from Sept. 20-22 on the goals, international leaders will have to contend with the entrenched problems that hinder advances. The goals were first adopted by leaders of 189 countries at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000. The date for meeting them was 2015. The 8 goals and 21 quantifiable targets are measured by 60 indicators. The UN uses 1990 as the base year for assessing progress.

The goals are ambitious: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and develop partnerships for economic health.

UNDP

Helen Clark of the UN Development Program, center, looking at ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu, Mali, as part of an African trip assessing MDGs.

If the goals are met, world poverty could be cut in half, tens of millions of lives could be saved and billions more will have the chance to benefit from the global economy. As of 2005, the world’s developing regions cut the percentage of people who live on less than $1 a day to about 27 percent from about 46 percent, according to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2010. Despite the financial crisis of 2009-2009, the overall poverty rate is still expected to drop by 2015 based on current trends, with 920 million people stuck below the poverty line, about half the amount than in 1990. Southeast Asia has been especially productive in this category, having reduced its poverty levels to 19 percent from 40 percent.

With progress gaining, however unevenly, the situation in Southern Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and sub-Saharan Africa, which contain some of the poorest nations on earth, remains dire. These regions show major lags in attempts to reach even the lowest benchmarks notched in the eight goals.

Their failures are being attributed to conditions that include those that are deemed outside, unavoidable factors as well as what critics describe as a broken system that asks for more than what many of these poor nations can deliver. [See a related article, “Does the UN Measure What Matters for the MDGs?”]

The UN itself is the first to acknowledge that these developing regions are not meeting standards.

“Despite the many success stories in Africa, the continent over all is considered the most off-track towards meeting the goals,” wrote Margaret Novicki of the UN Department of Public Information, in an e-mail. “The challenges to achieve the goals are great.”

Copyright Viviane Moos/UNFPA

A midwife and patient in Rajasthan, India. The country is not on track to meeting the poverty reduction goal.

The statistics, from 2005, the latest available, are stark. More than half of the population of sub-Saharan Africa lives below $1 a day. This is down just 7 percent since 1990. The percentage of people living at that level in Southern Asia is 39 percent, down 10 percent from 1990. This is not much of a gain compared with Southeast Asia, which has cut its poor population in half since 1990. The percentage of people living below a $1 a day in Southeast Asia’s is 19 percent.

Sub-Saharan Africa shows similar disparities in other goals. As of 2008, nearly 25 percent of sub-Saharan African children did not attend primary or secondary school, compared with Southeast Asia’s 95 percent being enrolled in school. In Southern Asia, 90 percent of children were enrolled in school.

As of 2008, sub-Saharan Africa has the largest infant mortality and maternal death rates, followed by Southern Asia.
The UN says that these regions suffer from external misfortunes that prevent them from focusing on the goals.

“They vary from country to country,” Novicki said. “In some countries, the impact of conflict has set back development. In others, not enough priority has been placed on key sectors that are motors for development, such as health and education.”

A case study for this analysis can be found in Afghanistan, which in the last decade has endured both the harshness of an isolationist authoritarian regime and the brutality of an extended war and occupying force. Dealing with the Taliban’s dismissal of human rights and the current hampering of allied forces prioritizing security over development, Afghanistan struggles to make strides that other developing nations have succeeded in doing.

“The MDGs and security challenges are inextricably intertwined,” wrote Elisabeth Bosley, a spokeswoman for the Afghan Mission to the UN, in an e-mail. “There can be no security without a social and economic development, and no development without security. The two must be approached together.”

Afghanistan may rank as one of the worst achievers of the goals, but some critics argue that the progress the country has made is proportional to progress elsewhere. Despite facing an environment mired in constant conflict, Afghanistan has managed to improve its economy, which has grown 400 percent since 2003. Access to basic health care has risen to nearly 90 percent in the last decade. Analysts wonder if a country like China – which has made significant advances in the goals – could have similar achievements if it endured the constraints of war, a decentralized government and a poor population similar to the situation in Afghanistan.

Samir Sanbar, a former UN communications director who now runs the blog UNforum.com, said that the UN statistics were misleading.

“Any relation between the perceived progresses of the MDGs is accidental,” Sanbar wrote in an e-mail. “References to advancements in China and India seem like a statistical illusion. Their advance was propelled by certain dynamics unrelated to any activity by the UN MDG program.”

China, Sanbar said, would have reduced its poverty levels and mortality rates regardless of the goals.

“The Chinese would be delighted to report that positive movement in their country reflects an MDG accomplishment, although the UN had little to do with it,” Sanbar said.

Nevertheless, sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia remain sore thumbs in the campaign.

“Of course, there is still substantial progress to be made,” Bosley said.

Similarly, though these regions remain far behind others in achieving the goals, their few advances cannot be dismissed.

“I am optimistic about whatever minimal gains are made and have faith that civic society groups and grass-roots pressure will prod governments and senior UN officials to move ahead,” Sanbar said.