"African countries are doing much better than india in realising MDG"


Brasilia, 11 March 2010 – Less than five years from the 2015 deadline, a new methodology is proposed to evaluate MDG progress taking into consideration the commitment of countries by measuring their effort to accelerate MDG progress.  Results are impressive. Burkina Faso, which tops the list, showed improvement in 91.3 per cent of the MDG indicators. On the opposite direction, three Gulf States – Bahrain, Oman e Kuwait - have progressed in less than 30 per cent of the indicators. Brazil, as an emerging economy, was not left behind and improved almost 70 per cent of its development indicators, and is ranked ahead of India, South Africa and China, for example.
The new method is introduced by Degol Hailu and Raquel Tsukada on Achieving the Millennium Development Goals: A Measure of Progress, published by the UNDP International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth. By comparing the indicator levels before and after the 2000 agreement, it is possible to account for the efforts made by countries to meet the targets, considering particularities and distinguished realities instead of global set targets themselves. The publication points out that a significant number of sub-Sahran African countries have considerably improved the rate of progress on the MDGs. Eight of the ten countries whose rates accelerated most are from the region.
Hailu and Tsukada also compare differents goals and set of indicators. The progress in maternal mortality slowed down in 16 of 21 countries with available data. On the other hand, the indicator of people living below the poverty line improved in almost 80 per cent of the countries while universal primary education rates have accelerated in 70 per cent of the countries.
 It is a another perspective on evaluation and measurement, demonstrating that developing countries, specially those in Africa, are among the best performers in terms of MDG acceleration. Moving away from an analysis stricly in terms of 2015 targets, the new approach avoids creating “failure” labels and look at the commitment to the MDGs and the effort to accelerate progress.

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