This is the third in a series of regional reports on the Millennium Development Goals in the Asia-Pacific region.
It assesses the prospects of reaching the goals and targets, highlighting the potential gaps and indicating how these can be filled. It also looks at the potential for adding value to national initiatives through broader international partnerships through which the United Nations and other international organisations ‘deliver as one’.
The report says although the Asia-Pacific region is an economic powerhouse, with some of the world’s most dynamic economies, it has been making slower progress with some of the MDGs. Its greatest success has been with poverty, for which the region as a whole is likely to meet the 2015 target of halving the proportion of people living in poverty. But most countries will miss at least some of the other targets and goals, and a number will miss their goal even for poverty.
The report places the countries in ‘off-track’, ‘on-track’ or ‘early achievers’ categories for each of the MDGs. The targets for which the largest number of countries is offtrack are:
- CO2 emissions;
- rural sanitation coverage;
- the proportion of children underweight;
- rural access to clean water.
Among the targets and indicators of greatest concern are:
- child mortality: Of the 47 countries for which data are available, 15 are offtrack and several have regressed;
- maternal mortality – Some 250,000 women in the region die each year during childbirth or from pregnancy-related complications;
- climate change and environmental sustainability: Of 48 countries for which data are available, 30 are off-track for meeting the 2015 emissions target;
- water and sanitation – Eight out of 38 countries investigated are off-track for providing their rural populations with access to safe water, and 17 out of 32 countries are off-track for providing rural areas with access to basic sanitation;
- hunger and malnutrition – Around 545 million people in Asia and the Pacific are consuming less than the global standard of 2,200 calories per day – constituting 65 per cent of the world’s undernourished;
- communicable diseases – Although the prevalence, at 0.3 per cent, is lower than in some other world regions, it is still some way from meeting the MDG goal of halting and reversing the spread of HIV Aids by 2015;
- global cooperation: In 2005, only five countries had lived up to the developed country pledge that international aid should constitute at least 0.7 per cent of their gross national income.
