WB presents Global Monitoring Report on MDGs

Accra, May 23, GNA - The World Bank's Global Monitoring Report for 2007 indicates that there has been striking evidence of real progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in several areas of the globe, where rapid growth was gradually translating into falling levels of extreme poverty.

The report said: "In the five years between 1999 and 2004, global poverty fell by nearly four percentage points, lifting an estimated 135 million people out of destitution." It further applauded the positive performance of sub-Saharan Africa over the same period where the share of the extreme poor fell by nearly five percentage points, although the absolute number of poor had not fallen.

The sub-region remains the poorest developing region in the world with about two-fifths of its people living on less than a dollar a day. Mr Andrews Morrison, lead economist of the World Bank, presenting the Bank's Global Monitoring Report 2007 at a workshop in Accra on Wednesday, said there was more to be done in terms of scaling-up and extending support in some areas including gender mainstreaming, women's economic empowerment and health.

He said the report examined the responsibilities and accountability of donor countries, developing countries and the international financial institutions to support attainment of the eight MDGs, as agreed by 189 countries in 2000 and further monitored recent performance against the targets set.

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, maternal health, gender equality, combating child mortality, AIDS, all by the target date of 2015 - form a blueprint agreed to by all the world's countries and all the world's leading development institutions.

The MDGs represent a global partnership that has grown from the commitments and targets established at the world summits of the 1990s. Mr Morrison said while the report hailed progress made so far towards the halving of extreme poverty by 2015, it expressed concern about the sharp global as well as regional differences in human development in areas including education, health, access to sanitation and gender disparities.

"The largest gap in meeting development goals is in fragile countries with weak governance and capacity," he said. These fragile countries posed major challenges such as high infant, child and maternal mortality rates, resulting from preventable diseases. Mr Morrison mentioned weak institutional capacities and governance and political instability as the reasons why countries slid into fragility, saying they extracted high costs in terms of lives and physical damage and reduce growth and increase poverty.

He said though the donor community had provided financial support to programmes in these developing countries, their activities had been found to be concentrated within a certain area and suggested widespread donor activities to ensure equal benefit for countries. He said aid was particularly important in fragile states because it constituted the main source of their development finance. Ms Waafas Ofosu-Amaah, Senior Gender Specialist of the World Bank said the report, which also focused on gender equality and women empowerment, suggested that educating women and empowering them financially could greatly lead to a hike in success of attaining all the MDGs.

She said the Bank had developed a framework that targeted women and helped them compete favourably on the markets, help them become joint owners of land titles and provide labour intermediation services for young women.

She said for countries to attain the MDGs by the deadlines set, there was the need for coherency and a more effective "aid architecture," as well as sequence in development strategies with technical support from international institutions.