‘Asia’s growth can provide economic, social benefits to all’
Staff Report

ISLAMABAD—The Asia and Pacific region as a whole is making progress on many of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but there is uneven progress within countries and many of the less developed economies need global support to plug some of their key development gaps, says a new report.
The MDG 2007 report, received here on Monday, was produced through a regional partnership among Asian Development Bank (ADB), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP). The report titled “The Millennium Development Goals: Progress in Asia and the Pacific 2007” states that the region is well on track and ahead of its peers in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa to reduce extreme poverty by half, attain universal education and achieve gender parity in education by the target year 2015.
If the countries in the region that are off track- either slow or regressing- were able to speed up and meet the MDG targets by 2015 then some 196 million people in the region would be lifted out of grinding poverty, 23 million more children would no longer suffer from hunger and nearly one million children would survive beyond their fifth birthday, said the report.
The Asia and Pacific region accounts for about 65% of the world’s underweight children, as 28% of the region’s under-five children are underweight and many Asian countries exceeding prevalence rates of Sub-Saharan Africa. The most serious problems are in South Asia where most countries are off track, particularly child and maternal health indicators.The region’s overall maternal mortality ratio, at over 300 per 100,000 live births, is more than 30% higher than in Latin America and the Caribbean, and maternal deaths in Asia and the Pacific account for almost half of the global total.
The report warns that environmental pressures arising out of land degradation, poor water management (including flooding), rising pollution in urban areas, carbon dioxide emission contributing to climate change, and other factors could push more people into poverty. The other key areas where the Asia and Pacific region is making slow progress are provisions of access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation facilities. Across the region, over 560 million in rural areas lack access to improved water sources. The region has over 1.5 billion people without basic sanitation facilities, or 75% of the world’s population that have no access to such service.
While many countries in the region have resources to speed up and meet the MDGs, the poor and the weak states do not have funds to meet all their investment needs. “We need to build a global partnership for development to meet the investment gaps through channeling more funds better targeted to those areas, subsectors and people actually in need,” says Omar Noman, Deputy Director of UNDP Regional Center for Asia and the Pacific. Another way to meet the investment needs of the poor economies is to provide them with market access to developed markets, the report says.