With only two years away from the 2015 target for reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), progress has been diverse across goals and regions, according to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's (IMF) recently launched Global Monitoring Report 2013, which assesses progress towards the MDGs. In its 10th edition, the report focussed on rural-urban dynamics and their relationship to achieving the Millennium Goals. The report said that urbanisation had helped pull people out of poverty and had advanced progress towards the MDGs. It showed that urbanisation had been a major force behind poverty reduction and progress towards other MDGs as well. With over 80 per cent of global goods and services produced in cities, countries with relatively higher levels of urbanisation, such as China, had played a major role in decreasing extreme poverty worldwide, the report said. Conversely, the two least-urbanised regions, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, had significantly higher rates of poverty and continued to lag behind on most of the MDGs. But the report warned that if the forces of urbanisation were not managed speedily and efficiently, slums would proliferate, overwhelming city growth, exacerbating urban poverty, and derailing MDG achievements. “Urbanisation has implications for attaining the MDGs. Managed with care, it can benefit residents of both urban and rural areas; managed poorly, urbanisation can marginalise the poor in both areas. Slums are a symptom of the marginalisation of the urban poor,” the report said, adding that close to one billion people lived in urban slums in developing countries. Regarding the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region's performance in attaining the Millennium Development Goals, the report showed that the region had already achieved five of the nine targets, including halving extreme poverty, reducing infant, child and maternal mortality and improving access to sanitation. The region also stood out for achieving or making sufficient progress on the health and sanitation targets, the report said. According to the report, the MENA region had been successful in reducing poverty to 2.4 per cent in 2010, from six per cent in 1992. However, the region was still lagging behind on the MDGs related to undernourishment, primary school completion, gender parity in primary education, and access to safe drinking water. The report ascribed this to slow progress over the last few years. Meanwhile, the political uprisings in some countries could have hindered efforts towards achieving the Millennium Goals. Jos Verbeek, lead economist at the World Bank, stated that Egypt would be unable to address poverty, especially in rural areas, because of the events after the 25 January Revolution that had hampered the government's efforts to achieve the assigned targets. During a seminar organised by the Egyptian Centre for Economic Studies where the report was launched in Egypt last week, Verbeek said that Egypt had only achieved four out of the eight goals that are supposed to be met by 2015. Egypt still suffered from gender disparities that it needed to improve, and it needed to improve nourishment for mothers and children, he said. According to the report, Egypt had met targets relating to eradicating poverty, reducing under-five mortality rates, and improving access to water and sanitation. It also had achieved sufficient progress towards achieving primary education, reducing infant mortality and improving maternal health. As for rural-urban disparities in the MENA region, the report showed that the region had been successful in narrowing the rural-urban disparity in poverty rates to about three per cent in 2008, from seven per cent in 1990. However, differentials in urban and rural infant mortality rates in the region were as high as 10-16 percentage points. The report said that slippages in reaching the MDGs related to primary completion and gender parity in primary education also had serious consequences for women's empowerment, where wage differences by gender were as high as 80 per cent in countries like Jordan. Population trends in the MENA region showed that in 2011 60 per cent of the region's population lived in urban areas. Of the 133 million additional people projected to live in the region between 2011 and 2030, 78 per cent would live in urban areas, it said. The report called upon governments in the MENA region to aim at attaining the MDGs fully in both urban and rural areas. It called for complementary rural-urban development policies and an integrated strategy of planning, connecting, and financing. Overall, the report showed that targets such as the reduction of extreme poverty, gender equality in primary education, access to safe drinking water, and improved lives for at least 100 million slum dwellers had been reached. The proportion of people whose income was less than $1.25 a day had fallen from 43.1 per cent in 1990 to below 20.6 per cent in 2010, leaving 1.2 billion people in extreme poverty. Nonetheless, progress on the remaining MDGs had been lagging, especially for education and health-related goals. Global targets for infant, under-five, and maternal mortality, and to a lesser extent access to basic sanitation, were significantly behind what they should be, and progress needed to be accelerated if all of the goals were to be achieved by 2015, the report said. The Millennium Development Goals consist of eight international development goals that were officially established following the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in 2000. All 193 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organisations have agreed to achieve these goals by the year 2015. The goals are eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality rates, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development.
