The InterDependent

The gaunt faces and stick-thin bodies of starving families from Somalia and Ethiopia who have walked days without food to reach overcrowded refugee camps in Kenya are a reminder that as developing nations move toward improvement in the daily lives of their people, a cruel act of nature –in this case a catastrophic drought – can undo fragile gains all too quickly.

As the media images from the Horn of Africa were appearing in newspapers, online and on television screens early in July, the Millennium Development Goals Report 2011 delivered a lot of good news. Most important, poverty was continuing to decline globally, the report said, overcoming the threats caused by a world recession and higher food and energy prices. Universal primary education is increasing, child mortality is down, strategies to battle malaria, HIV-AIDS and tuberculosis are showing positive results and many more people, at least in urban areas, have access to clean drinking water.

With only four years to go till the 2015 deadline for meeting the eight goals set by the world’s nations in 2000, hope continues that some, if not all, will be met.

With that hope as a background, the compilers of the 2011 report on progress toward the goals could pause to consider the darker corners of the story, reflected in those desperate African faces and their counterparts in other parts of the world also suffering extraordinary hardships. What the report’s writers and researchers found was that there is still plenty of work to do by governments, donor nations, UN agencies and thousands of nongovernmental organizations dependent on public support.

For example, the report shows that in a world of seven billion people – a milestone to be reached in the fall – the steady decline of humans living on $1.25 a day or less from 1.8 billion in 1990 (the base date for the goals) to1.4 billion in 2005 has not been matched by a continuing decline in hunger.

“The proportion of people in the developing world who went hungry in 2005-2007 [the latest available figures] remained stable at 16 percent,” the report says. “Based on this trend, and in the light of the economic crisis and rising food prices, it will be difficult to meet the hunger-reduction target in many regions of the developing world.”

That reality is leading to much more interest and focus on jump-starting agricultural development and finding new crops and farming methods to reduce a slide into starvation.

Malnutrition, also related to use of the land, has also not fallen in some places as fast as development advocates had hoped. “The poorest children are making the slowest progress in reducing underweight prevalence,” the report continues, citing South Asia (led by India with its 1.2 billion people) as showing “no meaningful improvement” in the nutritional level of the poorest children between 1995 and 2009.

Joe Penney

Progress has been noted in many of the Millennium Development Goals, but improvements in water, sanitation and hunger remain questionable. Here, a village in Guinea-Bissau, which is ranked 164 out of 169 countries in the UN's human development index.

Water resources remain problematic, with sustainable supplies already exceeding their limits in North Africa and Western Asia, raising questions about whether agricultural development will be seriously hindered – and whether cleaner drinking water will always be available.

The situation with sanitation, measured in Goal 7 under environmental sustainably, is bleak. “The world is far from meeting the sanitation target,” the report says. Over 2.6 billion people have no form of improved sanitation, including flush toilets or relatively hygienic latrines. Two-thirds of those people, millions of whom have no choice but to defecate in the open, live in South Asia, according to the report.

It has been known for several years that women are faring very badly in progress toward the Millennium Goals. The report says that while parity between girls and boys at primary-school level is getting closer, only three developing regions have already met the goal – Southeast Asia; Central Asia and the Caucasus; and Latin America and the Caribbean. Education is viewed as a major investment in giving women more power in their own lives and in society.

When a girl reaches her teens and then adulthood, however, pregnancy becomes a major health risk. “Despite proven interventions that could prevent disability or death during pregnancy and childbirth, maternal mortality remains a major burden in many developing countries,” the report says. The goal for reduction of maternal mortality is considered by many to be the least likely to be met.

In the year of seven billion, the report turns to the large, unmet need for family planning help and the availability of contraceptives. More than 215 million women do not, for various reasons, have access to contraceptive supplies and sometimes information about how they work and how to use them. At the same time, aid for family planning activities has dropped in virtually all countries that receive them, the report finds.

“Over the coming decades,” the report says, “demand for family planning will likely increase, based on substantial unmet need and the expected rise in the number of women and men of reproductive age.”

Family planning programs need a renewed international commitment and a highly visible campaign to give the lives of ordinary women the attention they do not get or have the power to demand.