The United Nations (UN) said on Friday that achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) would require “equitable and inclusive economic growth, a rejuvenated global partnership and expeditious delivery on commitments already made”.

In its 2011 MDGs Report, released worldwide, the UN has said that despite “significant strides towards achieving the MDGs, reaching all the goals by 2015 remains challenging because the world's poorest are being left behind”.

First agreed at the UN Millennium Summit in September 2010, the eight MDGs set global objectives for reducing extreme poverty and hunger, improving health and education, empowering women and ensuring environmental sustainability by 2015.

“Between now and 2015, we must make sure that promises made become promises kept. World leaders must show not only that they care, but that they have the courage and conviction to act,” the UN Secretary General, Mr Ban Ki-Moon, said in a foreword to the report, which recounts development successes and chronicles challenges ahead.

Poverty reduction

The report said Asia continues to log the sharpest reductions in poverty worldwide and is making steady progress in improving child and maternal health. But the deep cuts in poverty are mainly found in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, where the MDGs' target of halving extreme poverty has already been met.

But the progress in Southern Asia has been slow and insufficient to meet the target, it said adding that only India, where the poverty rate is projected to fall from 51 per cent in 1990 to about 22 per cent in 2015, is “on track to cut poverty in half by the 2015 target date”.

While maternal health — the health of women during pregnancy and childbirth — has vastly improved across Asia. But Southern Asia has still the second highest level of maternal mortality among all regions (after sub-Saharan Africa) with 280 deaths per one lakh live births.

It said Southern Asia is also lagging behind in child nutrition as it has the highest rate of child under-nutrition in the world, with 43 per cent of children under five years of age being underweight in 2009.

It lamented that the poorest families have made the slowest progress, since the poorest 20 per cent of households showed no meaningful improvement in child under-nutrition between 1995 and 2009, while in the richest 20 per cent of households, child under-nutrition fell by almost one-third.

Stating that under-nutrition in children is often linked to a shortage of quality food and poor feeding practices, it said this combined with inadequate sanitation, had led to frequent diarrhoeal diseases.

In Southern Asia, only 36 per cent of the population use an improved sanitation facility, such as a toilet or latrine and nearly half the population practices open defecation, the highest rate among all regions of the world.

A redeeming feature, however, in the sub-region is a strong progress in primary school enrolment which reached 91 per cent in 2009, up from 79 per cent in 1999 and is “on track to meet the target of universal primary education by 2015”.

Girls, however, remain at ‘a distinct disadvantage' in Southern Asia, with only 95 girls enrolled in primary education, 89 girls in secondary education and 74 girls in tertiary education for every 100 boys.

Environmental sustainability

On environmental sustainability, the report said Asia was the only developing region to register a net gain in forested area with additions of 2.2 million hectares of forest annually over the past 10 years, thanks to large scale afforestation programmes in China, India and Vietnam.

Yet, carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to climate change, continued to rise across the region, with Eastern and Southern Asia logging the highest levels among developing regions globally, due mainly to emissions in China and India, the report said.

>geeyes@thehindu.co.in

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