[In fact, though, how much of
those gains can be attributed to the goals is unknown. The sharp reductions in
extreme poverty are due largely to the economic strides made by one big
country, China.
Likewise, some of the biggest shortfalls can be attributed to a handful of
countries that remain very far behind. In India,
for example, an estimated 600 million people defecate in the open, heightening
the risk of serious disease, especially for children.]
 |
Measures like using bed nets, like
ones used in
credited with a decline in the
mortality rate from malaria.
|
UNITED NATIONS — Dire poverty
has dropped sharply, and just as many girls as boys are now enrolled in primary
schools around the world. Simple measures like installing bed nets have
prevented some six million deaths from malaria. But nearly one billion people still
defecate in the open, endangering the health of many others.
These are among the findings that the United Nations released Monday as part of a final report on the
successes and failures of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets
established 15 years ago to improve the lives of the poor.
“The report confirms that the global efforts to achieve the
goals have saved millions of lives and improved conditions for millions more
around the world,” the United
Nations secretary
general, Ban Ki-moon, said Monday as he released the report in Oslo.
In
fact, though, how much of those gains can be attributed to the goals is
unknown. The sharp reductions in extreme poverty are due largely to the
economic strides made by one big country, China.
Likewise, some of the biggest shortfalls can be attributed to a handful of
countries that remain very far behind. In India,
for example, an estimated 600 million people defecate in the open, heightening
the risk of serious disease, especially for children.
Experts said the most important contribution made by the
Millennium Development Goals was establishing yardsticks for measuring what
countries have and have not done for their people — not just in broad-brush
economic indicators but in concrete measures of well-being, like how many women
die in childbirth or how many children are clinically malnourished.
“It’s a data revolution, and that’s important in and of itself,”
said Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development in Washington
The findings in the report are
likely to figure in contentious debates this summer over the United Nations’
next set of development goals, which world leaders are scheduled to adopt by
September. A draft of those goals includes 169 targets that would require huge
amounts of aid money to meet and would raise a host of tricky political issues
about global trade and climate change.
In releasing the report, United Nations officials celebrated
meeting some of the goals. For instance, one of the targets was to halve the
share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty by 2015, but the
actual decline was steeper: 14 percent of people in the developing world are
extremely poor now, compared with 47 percent in 1990. China
Other targets were missed, including those to reduce child
mortality and women’s deaths in childbirth each by two-thirds, although
progress was made on both fronts.
Malaria has been made a far
less deadly scourge than it was in 2000, when the targets were set, with the
mortality rate down by 58 percent, the report said. Fewer children are dying of measles than
in 2000, but measles vaccination coverage has stalled, the report said, and
21.6 million children were not fully immunized in 2013. Most measles deaths
were concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia , where the report called for
greater investments in public health.
Jobs are not keeping pace with population growth in either rich
or poor countries, an especially acute challenge for countries like India that
have ballooning populations of young people in need of work.
One of the starkest failures acknowledged in the report
concerned gender equity. Women are more likely than men to be poor, according
to the report, and women’s participation in the global paid labor force has
inched up only very slowly.
Critics say that setting global targets alone is not very
instructive.
“I’m not opposed to having a global yardstick, but I don’t put
much stock in it,” said Dean Karlan, an economics professor at Yale University
