CAIRO: Northern Africa looks set to achieve its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the targeted date of 2015, and has progressed faster than any other developing region. That is according to the United Nations' latest development report, released Tuesday. The Cairo release of the report is due today at the Arab League. Improvements in areas such as poverty, health, education and life expectancy all come under the MDG umbrella, and significant gains have been made in each. Rapid progress has been made in reducing child mortality for example, with a decline from 88 child deaths per 1,000 births in 1990 to 35 deaths in 2005. A related indicator, the proportion of underweight children, fell from 10 percent in 1990 to 8 percent in 2005. The target of making primary education universally available is also well underway, with enrollment now figuring at 95 percent. Yet despite these seemingly impressive statistics, one of the authors of the upcoming 2007 Egyptian Development report, Hania El-Sholkamy, warns against getting carried away. Regional variations can mask national development, El-Sholkamy told The Daily Star Egypt, and she argues that the MDGs are quite modest for a "middle income country like Egypt. Another author of the 2007 Egyptian Development report, and a Cairo University Statistics Professor Sahar Tawila agrees that many statistics from both regional and national Egyptian reports sound more impressive than they really are. Tawila, for instance, concedes that the number of people without access to drinking water in Egypt has decreased dramatically - from 12.1 million in 1992 to 6.1 million in 2004 - but points out that figures should never have been that high in the first place. Still, in some areas, experts are now hopeful that targets will be exceeded. The target of cutting extreme poverty in Northern Africa by half by 2015 is ahead of schedule, already down to 1.4 in 2004 from 2.6 percent in 1990. The 2007 Egyptian Development report, due to be released this fall, should give the clearest picture yet of the country's development, as, unlike reports from previous years, Egypt's hundreds of NGOs will have a significant input. According to the report's head author, Heba Handoussa, experts and organizations from every background, including businessmen, political scientists, sociologists, and medical doctors, have been consulted. "We can't just rely on our own (authors), Handoussa told The Daily Star Egypt. "We need to have civil society as a partner of our reports to make them succeed.
