Global Policy Forum

Stellar growth in China and India will help the world meet a target of halving extreme poverty by 2015, but sub-Saharan Africa lags far behind, the World Bank and IMF said in a report on Tuesday. The second annual monitoring report into progress on the "Millennium Development Goals" (MDGs) said "bold and urgent action" was needed to improve living standards around the world. "The credibility of the entire development community is at stake as never before," said World Bank president James Wolfensohn. "Rich countries must now deliver on the promises they have made in terms of aid, trade and debt relief, and the developing countries - especially in sub-Saharan Africa - need to aim higher and do better in terms of their own policies and governance and to make more effective use of aid," he said.

The United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, the largest-ever gathering of world leaders, adopted eight goals to be met by 2015 with the aim of eventually eradicating poverty, hunger and disease. The goals were dominated by a target to halve the proportion of people living on less than a US dollar a day (then 22 per cent of the world's population), and to halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

"The goal to halve poverty by 2015 will likely be met at the global level, but not in sub-Saharan Africa unless progress there can be accelerated quickly," the report by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund said. Thanks to huge economic strides being made in China and India, the world's two most populous countries, hundreds of millions more people are being lifted out of dire poverty, the report said. But in Africa, the only continent to have grown poorer in recent decades, far more needs to be done.

IMF deputy chief Anne Krueger said that to meet the poverty goal by 2015, sub-Saharan Africa needs to double its present growth rates to about seven percent a year over the next decade. "While the domestic agenda necessary for such a take-off is clearly country-specific, the broad priorities are sound macroeconomic management, an enabling climate for private-sector-led growth, and strong public-sector governance," she said.

Prospects for achieving the MDGs are the worst in health, the report said. The leaders agreed to reduce by two-thirds the child mortality rate for under-fives, to cut by three-quarters the maternal mortality rate, and to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and other major diseases.

But the IMF-World Bank report said that for that to happen, "substantial increases" are needed in the supply of teachers, doctors, nurses and community health workers. Africa, for example, needs to triple its health workforce to add one million personnel by 2015. "Behind cold data on the MDGs are real people and lack of progress has real and tragic consequences," said the World Bank's Zia Qureshi, the report's lead author. "Every week, 200,000 children under five die of disease. Every week 10,000 women die giving birth. In sub-Saharan Africa alone this year, two million people will die of AIDS. Worldwide, more than 100 million children in developing countries are not in school."

The report will feed into a review of the MDGs being conducted this year at a UN summit in September, as well as at IMF-World Bank meetings this weekend and a summit of the powerful Group of Eight in Scotland in July. Wolfensohn underlined the importance of a long-established goal for rich nations to increase their official aid to 0.7 per cent of their gross domestic product. "At stake are not just the prospects for hundreds of millions of people to escape poverty, hunger, and disease, but also prospects for long-term security and peace which are intrinsically tied to development," he said.

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