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 | Thursday, April 27, 2000, updated at 16:12(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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Global Poverty Reduction Unlikely to Achieve Summit Target, UNDP ReportMany regions of the world are unlikely to reach this year's poverty reduction target as set by the Social Summit of 1995, said a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report on world poverty released April 7.The three indicators used by the UNDP to measure long-term poverty, namely, adult illiteracy rates, child malnutrition rates, and the percentage of people threatened with premature death, were all supposed to be reduced by half between 1990 and 2000, according to the 1995 Social Summit target. But figures in the UNDP Poverty Report 2000 cast grave doubt on these over-optimistic projections. The illiteracy rate for people over 15 years of age in East Asia and the Pacific Region dropped from 20 percent in 1990 to 16 in 1997, still a long way from the 10 percent target. In South Asia, which had the highest adult illiteracy record of 54 percent in 1990, the figure had been reduced by only 5 percent by 1997. South Asia's percentage of children under five who are underweight dwindled slightly from around 55 percent in 1985 to a little less than 50 percent in 1995. Despite global improvement in this respect, slight as it is, the child malnutrition rate in sub- Saharan Africa had risen during the same period. Progress in life expectancy has also been slow, the report admits. The percentage of people not expected to survive to age 40 in the least developing countries declined by only 8 percent from 1988 to 1998. Many countries remain far from reaching an average life expectancy of only 60 years, the Social Summit target for 2000, according to the report.
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