By D.Arul Rajoo, Bernama,
Bangkok :The world is on track to halve the global poverty rate by 2015 and achieve the number one target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), largely due to progress made in East Asia, particularly China, according to the United Nations’ latest MDG report.
Without China’s contribution, the world would fail to meet the poverty reduction goal, says the MDG Report 2008, the most current global assessment on progress towards the eight MDGs on reducing poverty and deprivation.
Dr Noeleen Heyzer, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Escap), said the region could be proud of its achievements but there were still many countries lagging behind.
“In East Asia — the world’s poorest region three decades ago — the poverty rate has fallen from nearly 80 per cent in 1981 to 18 per cent in 2005.
In South Asia, it has fallen from 60 per cent to 40 per cent over the same period. These are no mean feats,” she said during the launch of the report here today.
But it was no time to celebrate as the region as a whole still had the highest number of poor people in the world, she said, adding that although enrolment and gender parity in schools were on the rise, malnourishment was a challenge.
Between 2000 and 2006, the primary school enrolment of girls increased more than that of boys in all developing countries of the region. South Asia made the most progress — there were 95 girls enrolled per 100 boys in 2006, compared with 77 girls per 100 boys enrolled in 1991.
Overall net primary school enrollment has also improved markedly, exceeding 95 per cent in Southeast Asia and 90 per cent in South Asia, a significant achievement for South Asia although 18 million children are still out of school.
“While our region is now doing better at providing basic education to our children, in particular for girls, we are failing them on another front — food and nutrition,” said Dr Heyzer.
In South Asia, almost every second child is underweight — twice as high as the rate in sub-Saharan Africa. In Southeast Asia, one out of four children is underweight, the same as in sub-Saharan Africa.
According to the report, almost half of the developing world’s population — about 2.5 billion people — still live without access to improved sanitation such as proper toilets, with more than one billion of them in Asia and the Pacific.
Another challenge faced by the region is the the rapidly rising carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as statistic show that East Asia has the highest rate of increase in total CO2 emissions worldwide since 2000 while in Southeast Asia, emission per unit of economic output had increased by 35 per cent since 1990.