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UN finds progress on anti-poverty goals

Developing countries are reducing extreme poverty, extending access to primary education and alleviating disease and hunger in many regions of the world, in pursuit of targets set in the year 2000 UN Millennium Declaration, according to an annual progress report from Secretary-General Kofi Annan released in New York this week.

In eastern, southern and south-eastern Asia, there are more than 200 million fewer people living in extreme poverty (on less than $1 a day) since 1990, and the report sees progress in northern African countries also in slashing extreme poverty rates in half by 2015. Primary school enrolment rates are above 90 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean, most of Asia, northern Africa and the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet republics), nearing the target of universal enrolment by 2015.

Hunger is receding in all regions of the world since 1990, although not everywhere at a rate currently sufficient to reach the 2015 target of reduction by half. According to very recent statistics, there is broad improvement in access to improved water sources. "In four short years, the eight Millennium Development Goals derived from the Millennium Declaration have transformed the face of global development cooperation," the report says.

"The broad global consensus around a set of clear, measurable and time-bound set of development goals has generated unprecedented, coordinated action."

But the UN warns that progress has been hardest to come by in the poorest nations: those that are landlocked or least developed, and those that are in sub-Saharan Africa. In many cases, there is lack of significant progress or even reversals.

There is a discouraging lack of progress on child survival and on very poor rates of maternal mortality that prevail in much of the world, and slow advances on access to improved sanitation.

The Millennium Development Goals set targets for progress in eight areas: poverty and hunger; primary education; women's equality; child mortality; maternal health; disease; environment; and a global partnership for development. Most of the targets call for substantial improvements by 2015, compared with 1990.

Many developing countries are in the process of re-tooling development programmes and strategies in line with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to the report, at least 65 countries and five regions or sub-regions have issued reports geared to measuring progress on the MDGs.

Their preparation has tended to move from drafting by a small group to a process whereby governments are engaging in national debates and tailoring MDG targets to national priorities and circumstances, the UN says of the MDG reports.

This has resulted in a stronger sense of national ownership and caused national policy decisions and planning efforts to gradually coalesce around a defined set of development aspirations, the United Nations Information Centre said.

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