Asia makes strides in cutting
poverty By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY - Many thought it couldn't be done,
but Asia is on track to meet its commitment to
halve extreme poverty by 2050, according to the
World Bank, with the target likely to be reached
several years early.
And it is getting
there with only modest gains across much of the
continent in education and health, with wide
gender disparities in employment, and with
inconsistent access to international aid.
The 2007 Global Monitoring Report assesses
progress in meeting
eight Millennium Development
Goals that were agreed on by 189 countries at a
landmark summit in 2000.
Reducing poverty
was the core commitment, but improvements were
also sought in a range of education, health and
sanitation standards, including child mortality,
nutrition, completion of primary school and a
sustainable use of resources.
Globally,
the number of extreme poor - those living on less
than US$1 a day - fell by 135 million people
between 1999 and 2004 to fewer than a billion,
putting the first goal well within reach by 2015.
But all regions of the world are likely to
miss their targets for reducing the easily and
cheaply preventable diseases that kill 10 million
children each year, while nearly 50% of households
still lack access to adequate sanitation.
"There is clear evidence of areas of great
improvement and problems being solved. Extreme
poverty is falling. Measles incidence is
declining, gender parity in education is stronger,
expanding access to anti-retroviral treatments for
people with HIV/AIDS is increasing," World Bank
spokesman Mark Sundberg said.
"Concerted
effort can yield results, and we also know that
developing countries are better prepared to use
this aid. The challenge now is to double our
efforts and accelerate progress to addressing
these remaining challenges."
Asia is
generally closer to meeting the overall goals than
the other developing regions, including Latin
America and Africa, but there are sharp variations
in performance across the continent.
The
benchmark in the six years that assessments have
been taken is East Asia, grouped together with the
Pacific in the report, as the region is swept
along by the spectacular economic growth of China.
Only 2.4% of people in East Asia are expected to
be living in extreme poverty by 2010, down from
29.8% in 1990 and well under the target of 15%. In
just three years, from 2002 to 2004, 57.7 million
people were removed from the list, though
inequality remains widespread.
Progress
has been less spectacular In South Asia, despite
the growth momentum of India, with 18% expected to
be living in extreme poverty in 2015. While this
is below the target of 21.5%, there were still 462
million people classed as extremely poor in 2004.
About 43% of people in India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, Sri Lanka, Nepal
and Bhutan were living in poverty in 1990, but the
proportion had fallen to 31.7% by 2005. Since
2000, real per capita incomes have grown faster
than at any time since the 1960s.
Nepal,
dogged by political turmoil and economic
stagnation, has registered the slowest
improvement. Although the poverty rate fell by 11
percentage points in eight years, it appears
unlikely the 2015 deadline will be met.
At
the bottom end of the scale, Central Asia -
grouped with developing Europe in the report -
will need a further spurt to reach the poverty
target, though it appears likely to do so with
economic growth rates currently averaging 11.5%.
As of 2004, the most recent assessment year, 4.4
million people were living in extreme poverty,
almost 50% more than in 1990. This represents
0.94% of the combined population, compared with
0.46% in 1990.
Most of the lag is in the
former communist countries grouped under the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
There is no direct basis for comparison
with other Asian regions because the report adopts
the benchmark of $2 a day for extreme poverty
because of the colder climate in these countries.
But even if the lower threshold of $1 a day were
used, Azerbaijan would be the only CIS country to
achieve the goal of halving poverty by 2015.
Uzbekistan, with an annual per capita income of
$520, was classed as the most fragile state.
Interestingly, the gains in poverty
eradication have come despite patchy progress
elsewhere: South Asia is on course to miss all
other development goals, while East and Central
Asia are struggling in some areas, possibly
because the targets themselves are flawed.
"Some experts think South Asia region is
lagging on this set of goals but doing better on
the poverty-reduction goal because the
human-development goals are ambitious and
complicated," the World Bank acknowledged in a
foreword to the report.
In the health
categories, South Asia has the highest rates of
malnutrition in the world, with three countries
unlikely to meet the deadline. The prevalence of
underweight children younger than five is 38-51%
in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
This region also has some of the lowest
participation rates for woman in the workforce,
frustrating efforts to achieve better gender
equality and raise overall income levels. Only
about 40% of woman in their 30s are working,
compared with more than 90% of men.
By
contrast, nearly 80% of women aged 24-49 are
employed in East Asia and their share of
non-agricultural labor markets, an indicator of
how open workforces are to women, is a high 39%.
While social and cultural stigmas often
present a gender barrier to the schooling of
children in South Asia, East Asia has almost
eliminated disparities in elementary and secondary
education - though not yet at a tertiary level.
International aid remains a key factor in
poverty eradication and the level of inflows may
be a pointer to why some regions are lagging
behind.
Official development aid for
Central Asia decreased in 2002-05, with low-income
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan among the
worst affected. Since 2001, grants for these
countries have risen by just 9%.
In
booming East Asia, official aid increased by
one-third in this period to levels last seen in
2002, but this was partly because of humanitarian
assistance for Indonesia after the December 2004
tsunami and the emergence of China and South Korea
as major donors.
Vietnam was one of the
biggest recipients of development aid, attracting
commitments of $1.9 billion.
The tsunami
was also a big factor in the big increase in aid
to South Asia, as Pakistan and Sri Lanka rebuilt
shattered communities.
Afghanistan has
also seen a 50% increase since 2001, but this was
largely due to development projects linked to the
US-led "war against terrorism".
India, the
largest country in the region, saw aid levels more
than double in 2004, but they were still not
equivalent to levels seen before 2003.
Alan Boyd, now based in Sydney,
has reported on Asia for more than two decades.
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