CAIRO: While the 2011 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Progress Report indicates a decrease in poverty globally, experts argue that such statistics do not reflect a decrease in poverty in the Arab world. "The decrease in poverty as a global detector doesn't necessarily reflect a decrease in the poverty rate in the Arab world," said Khawla Mattar, the director of the United Nations Information Center (UNIC) in Cairo during the official launch of the report. "Yemen has shown very little progress in most of the MDGs," said Mattar. The report shows that the number of the poor has decreased but the percentage of hunger has simultaneously increased. "There is a contradiction here, this reflects an inconsistency in the statistics upon which the report is based," said Ahmad Sayed El-Naggar, head of the economic studies department at the Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. "Poverty is relative. We can't measure poverty rates accurately disregarding that prices are going up while the minimum wage income hasn't changed," said El-Naggar. Mattar explained that those statistics can sometimes lack transparency because they are coming from governmental institutions or non-governmental institutions whose data are supervised by their countries' governments. "The HIV-AIDS data for example is not very accurate because it's considered a sensitive issue in some cultures," said Mattar. The 2011 MDGs Progress Report, that was launched last Thursday in a press conference at the UNIC, shows a variance in the progress of the MDGs in different regions. The report states that there is an improvement in the quality of life, improvement of child health and a decrease in poverty all over the world. The report shows that the number of those living under the poverty line has decreased from 1.8 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion in 2005. Primary education in North Africa also increased from 89 percent in 1990 to 98 percent in 2005. "However, there is a drop in the number of girls attending school," said Mattar. "Those percentages can be deceptive because the dropout rate is not being measured constantly," El-Naggar said. El-Naggar said that energy prices have decreased as a result of the global economic crisis, contrary to what the report has stated. He attributed the low level of women's participation in paid work to cultural reasons newly introduced to the Egyptian society from the Gulf region. He also said that the education and health sectors' expenditure in Egypt is still very low and further decreased in the new public budget recently approved by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces. The report also indicates that more attention needs to be paid to justice, equality and women's rights. The rate of child deaths has decreased from 12.4 million to 8.1 million, according to the report. The HIV-AIDS treatment has also increased 10 times from 2004 to 2009. The United Nations state members and another 23 organizations have agreed to achieve the MDGs by the year 2015. The eight goals include eradicating extreme poverty, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality reducing child mortality rates, improving maternal health fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development.
