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DEVELOPMENT-NICARAGUA: Despite Efforts, MDGs Still Distant Goals

José Adán Silva

MANAGUA, Feb 7 2008 (IPS) - Despite the social plans implemented by the government of Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua has made little progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), say independent analysts.

Ortega, who took office in January 2007, has launched programmes like Zero Hunger in rural areas, Zero Usury, which grants low interest loans to poor women, and an adult literacy drive, besides making education free once again for children and teenagers.

Some 12,000 rural families have benefited from the Zero Hunger programme, around 13,000 women have obtained loans, and an estimated 110,000 adults have joined the literacy drive. In addition, medicines have been distributed free of charge by the public health system to more than 450,000 people.

But sociologist Óscar René Vargas told IPS that Nicaragua has failed to make headway with respect to certain MDGs, such as cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015, from 1990 levels.

According to a January 2007 United Nations report, 14.9 percent of Nicaraguans live in extreme poverty – just 4.5 percent less than in 1990.

Nicaragua is the second poorest country in Latin America, after Haiti, with 47 percent of the population of 5.6 million living on less than two dollars a day.

"We are far from the goal of reducing extreme poverty to 9.7 percent of the population by 2015," said Vargas, referring to the first of the eight MDGs that were adopted by the United Nations member countries in 2000.

The other MDGs are to halve hunger from 1990 levels, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and maternal health, reduce child mortality, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development.

Vargas criticised Ortega’s leftist government for failing to make therapeutic abortion legal in cases in which the woman’s life is endangered, the fetus is deformed, or the pregnancy is the result of rape. He said that the criminalisation of abortion under all circumstances stands in the way of efforts to promote gender equality, reduce infant mortality, and improve maternal health.

"There is no sex education in public schools, there are no campaigns on the use of condoms, and there are no HIV/AIDS prevention programmes, because the Catholic Church does not like those issues," said Vargas.

Follow-up of compliance with the MDGs is carried out by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which has avoided making pronouncements on the grounds that there is insufficient information to measure progress just one year into the current administration.

In December, UNDP economic adviser María Rosa Renzi told the press that Nicaragua had risen two spots on the agency’s Human Development Index, to 112th position, in 2006.

She added, however, that the country had failed to curb the rise in poverty, and that the increase in gross domestic product had not benefited the poor because of the unequal distribution of wealth.

Javier Meléndez, executive director of the non-governmental Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policies, said that due to the lack of official information on compliance and on the results of social programmes, "it is practically impossible to consider Nicaragua’s progress towards the MDGs as positive."

According to Meléndez, a study by his institute showed that the government’s anti-poverty policy "is more rhetoric than fact."

"Forty-five percent of the budget earmarked for the fight against poverty goes to bureaucratic costs, like salaries, and there is no official information on compliance with respect to the other 55 percent," he said.

Cirilo Otero, director of the Centre for Research on Environmental Policies, said environmental protection is the area in which the least progress has been made.

The measures taken by the government, he said, are "temporary and circumstantial last-minute solutions" rather than the long-term initiatives needed to meet the MDGs.

"Neither this government nor previous administrations have had a policy of environmental conservation as agreed in the MDGs," said Otero.

He noted that Nicaragua is nowhere near the targets of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and appropriate sanitation services, which form part of the 7th MDG, on environmental sustainability.