MDG shortcomings tagged

THE PHILIPPINES stands nearly at par with Southeast Asian neighbors in its progress to fight poverty, disease, pollution and illiteracy — the targets of the so-called Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — with roughly half of its indicators on track or at optimum levels before a 2015 deadline.

But the country has fared badly in tackling hunger as well as a low turnout of primary school graduates, two areas where the rest of the region has done well, a United Nations and Asian Development Bank report released late on Tuesday stated.

The report was released in time for a UN General Assembly in New York where world leaders took stock of their performance towards seven goals concerning extreme poverty and hunger, primary education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal and reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases and environmental sustainability.

Among the 21 sub-targets for these broad goals, the Philippines is likely to meet or would have already achieved 11 by 2015, including gender equality, tuberculosis eradication, as well as several environmental aims like securing protected areas, limiting carbon emissions and “ozone depleting substances.” The country is also doing well in managing HIV prevalence and making available safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

Southeast Asia, as a whole, is on track or has already achieved 12 of the sub-targets including those on primary school completion rates and incidences of extreme hunger.

Philippine progress in these two regional strengths, however, has been deemed “slow” or “regressing.”

This is contrary to a recent National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) statement that the country is “likely” to meet hunger and poverty goals in the next five years. The state agency has conceded that achieving goals on primary schooling and maternal health could take more time.

If the country could only meet the target of reducing the population living on less than $1.25 per day by 2015, the number of Philippine poor by then would be reduced by roughly 8% to just 15.616 million, the report stated. And if it met primary enrolment targets, the number of children not attending school by 2015 would be reduced to just 741,000 instead of 1.83 million.

Performance in the remaining other indicators have been graded similarly low, bringing to 10 the number of sub-targets the country is unlikely to meet by 2015.

Southeast Asia, on the other hand, is expected to miss the deadline for just nine sub-targets.

“We need to push ourselves more to meet the MDGs, particularly where we are lagging behind,” a Philippine government statement at the UN summit which was released yesterday stated.

The new administration, the statement read, will soon be unveiling its 2010-2016 medium-term development plan which includes “an appropriate mix of physical and social infrastructures and… social safety nets, like conditional cash transfers and universal health-care” to meet the MDGs. –JESSICA ANNE D. HERMOSA, Senior Reporter, Businessworld