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ASIA-PACIFIC: MDGs Progress Unknown for Lack of Data

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 8 2007 (IPS) - In a moment of rare candour, officials from a regional United Nations body and the Asia Development Bank (AsDB) admitted that studies to gauge progress of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are hampered by out-of-date information.

The revelations came during the launch of a report to assess progress of countries in the Asia-Pacific region at midpoint to the 2015 deadline for achievement of the MDGs. The most comprehensive data available for the region’s MDG calculations is for 1999, the year before the Millennium Summit in September 2000 when the world’s leaders pledged to meet a series of development targets in the next 15 years.

‘’In many countries, the data provided at the national level is not reliable,’’ Raj Kumar, principal officer at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), based in Bangkok, told IPS. ‘’The most comprehensive, comparable figures we have for the Asia-Pacific region are for 1999.’’

It echoed the view of Pietro Gennari, chief of ESCAP’s statistic division, who presented the region’s MDG report card. ‘’There are still many data gaps in the MDG database. The data is scattered over time and across countries,’’ he said during the launch of the 56-page report published by ESCAP, the Manila-based AsDB and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

‘’Social data in countries can be more difficult to collect when the mechanisms are not there,’’ Jean-Pierre Verbiest, AsDB’s country director for Thailand, said in an interview.

The revelations of this information black hole drew caustic responses from civil society organisations that have been monitoring the U.N.-led MDG campaign. ‘’We are not surprised by this admission about a lack of information,’’ says Anoop Sukumaran, a researcher at Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank. ‘’We have been asking this question about reliable information from the very beginning.’’

‘’When they now say that the numbers and the data they have is problematic, it raises fundamental questions about the thesis on which they have gone about this MDG business,’’ he explained to IPS. ‘’It means the very foundation is shaky about solving the problem and achieving the MDGs.’’

What is also troubling to civil society organisations is that the confession comes after large amounts of money have been spent and a global bureaucracy created around the MDG campaign since 2000. Typical is the role of the UNDP to help train authorities in the developing world to collect MDG-related data. The MDGs have also been used as a popular mantra by U.N. agencies and the AsDB to launch regular reports over the past seven years to cheer on this campaign.

The call for the MDGs arose from a need to set time-bound goals in specific areas to improve the quality of life for the world’s weak and marginalised living in the developing world, where the planet’s majority resides. The first goal was to cut by half the number of people living in extreme poverty – or who live below the income of one U.S. dollar a day – by 2015.

The second and third goal dealt with education, where all children, both boys and girls, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling and the elimination of the gender gap in primary and secondary education by 2015.

There were also targets set to reduce child mortality – reduce by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015, the death rates of children under five years of age – and improve maternal health, by aiming to slash by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio.

The last three of the eight MDGs called for action to halt the spread of global killer diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria, ensure environmental sustainability and to create a new ‘’global partnership’’ for development between the developing and the industrialised world.

This week’s report on the Asia-Pacific region warned that the child mortality, malnutrition and maternal health care remained a daunting challenge, with the limited progress on slashing child malnutrition being on par with the numbers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The region accounts for 100 million of the world’s malnourished children, which is 65 percent of the world’s total. ‘’South-Asia alone accounts for 80 million underweight children,’’ said Gennari.

On the push to achieve the goal of universal primary education, the results are mixed. ‘’The Asia-Pacific region has done quite well, enrolling nearly 94 percent of school-age children – still behind Latin America and the Caribbean, which with a 97 percent rate counts as an early achiever, but some way ahead of Sub-Saharan Africa’s 70 percent,’’ states the report. ‘’Nevertheless this region still accounts for one in three of the world’s children out of school.’’

Yet the admission about the lack of recent, comprehensive data hampers the picture about the benchmarks reached half-way into the MDGs. And officials IPS spoke to admitted that part of the problem lies with the way governments in the region view the need to collect and share information about the local social indicators.

‘’Getting information on social issues is much more difficult than getting economic data,’’ says Kumar of ESCAP. ‘’This is not a high priority for most governments. And they do not see it as a good thing, too, about why they should reveal information about child mortality and malnutrition at home.’’

This information gap, furthermore, was another feature that the MDGs set out to resolve. ‘’When the MDGs were introduced, it meant for the first time as an attempt to actually measure government polices and targets,’’ says Verbiest of AsDB. ‘’At that time we knew there was data missing. And one of the achievements of the MDGs was to get accurate data and measure it.’’