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Countries Need to Do More to Meet UN's 2015 Goals: UNDP
Many countries are not on track to achieve human development goals set by the world leaders at the Millennium Summit in 2000, according to U.N. analysts.
Ninety-three countries, with 62 percent of the world's population, are not on track to reduce mortality of children under five by two-thirds by 2015, said the Human Development Report 2001 compiled by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and released Tuesday.
Eleven million children below the age of five still die every year from preventable causes, or some 30,000 a day, it added.
Similarly, 83 countries, with 70 percent of the world's population, are not on track to halve the share of their citizens without access to safe drinking water, and nearly 1 billion people still need such access, the report said.
Seventy-four countries, with more than one third of the world's population, are not on track to halve income poverty by 2015. There are still 1.2 billion people in the world living on less than one U.S. dollar a day.
Authors of the report urged global initiatives to ensure that new technologies address the most pressing needs of the world's poor.
They called for greater international funding for research and development, differential pricing between rich and poor countries for medicine and other essential high-tech products and fair implementation of global intellectual property rights, including compulsory licensing of patents.
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