Millenium Development Goals Missed For 2.4 Billion People

As most developing nations fall short of meeting their goals on sanitation, the world’s poorest countries have been lagging far behind, according to a new U.N. report released here.



The Joint Monitoring Programme report, ‘Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2015 Update and MDG Assessment’, authored by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO), says one in three people, or 2.4 billion worldwide, are still without sanitation facilities – including 946 million people who defecate in the open.

“What the data really show is the need to focus on inequalities as the only way to achieve sustainable progress,” said Sanjay Wijesekera, head of UNICEF’s global water, sanitation and hygiene programmes.
“The global model so far has been that the wealthiest move ahead first, and only when they have access do the poorest start catching up. If we are to reach universal access to sanitation by 2030, we need to ensure the poorest start making progress right away,” he said.

Pointing out the existing inequities, the report says progress on sanitation has been hampered by inadequate investments in behaviour change campaigns, lack of affordable products for the poor, and social norms which accept or even encourage open defecation.
Although some 2.1 billion people have gained access to improved sanitation since 1990, the world has missed the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target by nearly 700 million people.
Today, only 68 per cent of the world’s population uses an improved sanitation facility – 9 percentage points below the MDG target of 77 per cent.
Still, the world has made “spectacular progress” in water, Jeffrey O’Malley, Director, Data, at UNICEF’s Research and Policy Division, told reporters Tuesday.

In 2015, 91 percent of the global population used an improved drinking water source, up from 76 percent in 1990, while 6.6 billion people have access to improved drinking water.
The total without access globally is now 663 million, almost a 100 million fewer than last year’s estimate, and the first time the number has fallen below 700 million.
As the MDGs expire this year, the goal on water has been met overall, but with wide gaps remaining, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The goal on sanitation, however, has failed dramatically. At present rates of progress it would take 300 years for everyone in Sub-Saharan Africa to get access to a sanitary toilet, said the report.

Tim Brewer, Policy Analyst on Monitoring and Accountability at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS the MDG goal on water was met largely because of those who were easiest to reach.
“The poorest are often still being left behind. What we need to do in the new U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), now under negotiation, is to make sure that progress for the poorest is made the headline figure.”
“We cannot have another situation where we appear to be succeeding because the situation of the comparatively wealthy has improved, even as millions of people are still falling ill from dirty water or from environments that are contaminated with faeces,” he noted.

Brewer said monitoring is key: “We need to measure basic access for the poor, as well as measuring other indicators such as whether water is safe and affordable, and whether wastewater is safely treated.”
“This is the only way to make sure we reach everyone, everywhere by 2030 and hold governments accountable to their promises,” he argued.

taken from here

shitty Ghana

About 13,900 Ghanaian adults and 5,100 children under five years die each year from diarrhea.

Statistics also revealed that 4.63 million people in Ghana had no toilets and relieved themselves in the open while 16.34 million another used unsanitary or shared latrines. Ghana has a population of 24.3 million. With current sanitation coverage of 14 per cent, experts say it would be difficult for the country to meet the Millennium Development Goal on sanitation, which has a target of 54 per cent.

http://www.theafricareport.com/index.php/20120229501806154/society-and-culture/poor-sanitation-costing-ghana-hundreds-of-millions-501806154.html

It won't wash

It will take two centuries for sub-Saharan Africa to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, according to NGO WaterAid.

“Diarrhoea, 90 percent of which is attributable to inadequate sanitation and dirty water, is the single biggest killer of children in Africa, and yet sanitation targets are off-track,” Tom Slaymaker, one of the report’s authors.

Every day, 2,000 children die from diarrhoea in sub-Saharan Africa. Four out of 10 people do not have access to safe water, while seven out of 10 do not have appropriate sanitation facilities.

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) are being sidelined as governments concentrate on health and education. It is not a sexy topic - politicians much prefer to say they're opening a hospital or school, rather than building some toilets.

In Ethiopia, 193,000 deaths per year are WASH-related, and 71.4 million people have no access to sanitation facilities. Similar figures apply to Mali, Niger, Benin, Ghana and Congo, where 194,000 deaths a year are WASH-related and 49.5 million people have no access to sanitation facilities.

According to WaterAid, the Côte d'Ivoire administration targeted 0.06 percent of its GDP to water and sanitation, Ghana spent 0.29 percent, Liberia 0.28 percent, Madagascar 0.28 percent, Nigeria 0.18 percent, Uganda 0.41 percent and Zambia 0.56 percent. African governments need to commit at least 3.5 percent of GDP to sanitation and water to get back on track,

Over one billion people will miss the global MDG sanitation target if things continue unchanged In Asia, India will not reach its MDG on sanitation before 2047, while Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal will not achieve the target before 2028.

For Ourselves

The deadline for the world to meet its millennium development goals is now only four years away, yet in sub-Saharan Africa, there are still 570 million people without adequate sanitation, and it will be another 200 years before just half of the population of this region have access to a safe, private toilet. In Nigeria sanitation coverage stands at just 32%. Children die at the rate of 4,000 a day. That's the equivalent of one child dying in the time it takes to read this paragraph. Building a latrine is only half the battle.

In many rural areas in west Africa, the practice of open-air defecation is ritualised and bound in tradition. Beyond individual differences, the members of a group or society are united by similar ways of thinking and behaving, and will react to situations in similar ways. Our research showed that reasons for resistance to using a latrine included beliefs that one might be possessed by demons, lose magical powers or live a shorter life. Some believe a toilet is meant only for wealthy people or that, if somebody feeds you, you should in turn defecate in their field. For many in so-called modern cultures who take the use of a safe, private toilet for granted, these reasons may sound funny, even ridiculous. However, it soon becomes sobering to think that each of these beliefs may be directly linked to disease, debilitation and death.

An approach known as community-led total sanitation (CLTS) was first conceived in Bangladesh and the concept has been sweeping across south Asia with impressive results, and many are hoping that it can bring similar results to Africa. It is based on an understanding that the people themselves have the solutions and are best able to determine which interventions will enable them to attain a self-defined, collective destiny.

Instead of focusing on the supply and installation of sanitation hardware to communities, CLTS focuses on changing attitudes and behaviour through community mobilisation to stop open defecation, and to build and use latrines. Participants have reported that they find the approach engaging, participatory and, most notably, empowering – putting them in control of their own destiny, in a context in which, more often than not, death by disease is accepted with fatalistic submission to the 'will of God' or the hex of an enemy or the local witch. Empowering local communities – especially women – with information that allows them to make decisions pertaining to their health and well-being ensures that they "own" the desired change. It is they who can be credited for the health benefits of safe sanitation and hygiene practices. It is they who commit to the necessary behaviour change, they who hold themselves and their peers accountable.

Help is not coming from outside, but from within - and people are in charge of their own destiny.

TAKEN FROM HERE

blue skies on the horizon

Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy, two US-based academics, find that in the 10 years before the credit crunch began, poverty rates fell and inequality declined right across the continent of Africa.

"Our results show that the conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. In fact, since 1995, African poverty has been falling steadily," the authors say. "Moreover, contrary to the commonly held idea that African growth is largely based on natural resources and helps only the rich and well-connected, we show that a great deal of this growth has accrued to the poor."

Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy say that by 2006 the African poverty rate was 30% lower than in 1995, and 28% lower than in 1990. They say the Gini coefficient, an international benchmark for social inequality, has declined consistently, if slowly, since the early 1990s.

The findings in the report, published by America's National Bureau of Economic Research, contradict the views of the World Bank and the United Nations, which established the millennium goals in 1990.

Some development experts are not convinced. Stefan Dercon, of Oxford University, said the authors placed too much weight on government statistics such as GDP, and ignored other data. "They believe the evidence that many of us would least trust and throw away the evidence we tend to think is fairly accurate. Painstakingly collected household consumption and income surveys, especially when over various years using the same method in each year, give a rather detailed picture of whether there is massive enrichment or not. And unfortunately, the evidence for Ethiopia, where I have been doing this for years, doesn't show such massive improvement."

So it could be good news or still bad news . But for sure , its old news . The world economy DID suffer a drastic downturn in 2008, and has not yet recovered. Poverty is certainly more widespread today than it was in 2006.This study does nothing for the people who are starving and living in slums, whether they are millions, billions or just hundreds of thousands we should not let anyone anywhere not be able to buy food .

Child Mortality Rates

Promised reforms by Capitalism have a history of failing and it appears the progress in cutting the number of deaths among children under five is still "grossly insufficient" in some parts of the world, Unicef has warned.

The UN children's agency warns many poorer countries will not meet the 2015 Millennium Development Goal of cutting that figure by two thirds. The situation is worst in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, it said .

Last year, 9.2 million children aged under five died across the world. It warns that malnutrition is now a contributing cause in around a third of deaths

Central and eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia and the Pacific countries have cut deaths among under-fives by over 50% since 1990. But over the same period, deaths in western and central Africa have fallen by just 18%; in sub-Saharan Africa the figure was 21%, while in eastern and southern Africa it was 26%.

In Sierra Leone, the country with the worst under-five mortality rate in the world, 262 out of every 1,000 children die before their fifth birthday.The rate for industrialised nations is just six deaths per 1,000 live births.

your child's health report

The report, "The State of Africa's Children 2008," was launched on May 28 at the Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development in Japan.

The facts are shocking.

Although Africa accounts for only 22 percent of births globally, half of the 10 million child deaths annually occur on the continent. Africa is the only continent that has seen rising numbers of deaths among children under five since the 1970s.

Many of these children die of preventable and curable diseases.

UNICEF's report says malaria is the cause of 18 percent of under-five deaths in Africa. Diarrheal diseases and pneumonia -- both illnesses that thrive in poor communities where sanitation is severely compromised, and where residents are often undernourished and exposed to pollution -- account for a further 40 percent of child deaths. Another major killer is AIDS.

sub-Saharan Africa is unlikely to achieve any of the health-related Millenium Development Goals by 2015; the continent lags behind on progress towards eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, improving maternal health, and halting and reversing the spread of HIV. One in every six children in sub-Saharan Africa will still die before his or her fifth birthday. The region is described by UNICEF as the most difficult place in the world for a child to survive.

In South Africa, 250,000 children under 15 are HIV-positive -- a huge proportion of the estimated 400,000 children under 15 who have been infected with HIV in Africa. Despite the expanded provision of anti-retroviral drugs, 64,000 more children contract the virus in South Africa each year. Across the southern African region, under-five deaths have risen by 17 percent between 1990 and 2006; these deaths are mostly attributed to HIV/AIDS.
In West and Central Africa, there were more people without access to clean drinking water in 2004 than in 1990. Unsafe drinking water can cause diarrhea, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases.

It needn't be like that !

There can be expanded immunization programs, the increased use of insecticide-treated bed nets, and the provision of vitamin A supplements to children.
Other interventions in Africa include exclusive breast-feeding practices up to six months and the prescription of anti-retroviral medication to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV.
In Ghana, all pregnant women are now covered by an intervention program that includes iron and folic acid supplementation and preventative treatment for malaria. All children between six months and five years of age are vaccinated against childhood diseases like measles and polio.
In Malawi, the government has rolled out immunization programs as well as micronutrient supplementation -- small amounts of vital minerals like iron, cobalt, chromium, and copper. The government is also building wells to improve access to clean water for people living in remote towns and villages.
Rethinking the supply and management of water systems is also crucial. In Ghana, a water reform program introduced in the 1990s has met with huge success. Responsibility for water supplies was transferred to local governments and rural communities and by 2004 access to clean water sources had increased to 75 percent from a low 55 percent.

Just imagine if there were no financial budgets acting as restraints on peoples needs and that the labour hours spent on wars and State oppression were re-directed to constructive and not destructive purposes.

Water , water everywhere but not a drop to drink

An estimated 84,000 Ghanaians dying each year from diseases related to poor water quality . The Ghana Water Company says it is no longer able to supply even half of the 150 million gallons of water that people in the capital , Accra, require each day.

Accra could have an abundant water supply from the nearby Volta Lake, the world's largest manmade body of fresh water. But many of the pipes delivering the water to the city are cracked and broken and the government has done little to repair them. As a result many residents resort to polluted rivers and ponds, or hand-dug wells where the water is often unclean.

The government acknowledges the problem. “It’s about aging infrastructure, lack of investment and waste,” the minister for water resources, Boniface Abubakar Saddique told IRIN . To raise more capital for infrastructure the ministry restructured the way it managed water in 2006, handing control over to a private company, Aqua Vitens Rand Limited. Two years later, however, fewer people in Accra can access water than when the system was government-run .

A representative of the non-governmental organisation ISODEC (Integrated Social Development Centre) said , “Its sad politicians constantly spew rhetoric on providing potable water to citizens but never offer concrete alternatives.”

The government intends to purchase two executive jets at a cost of US$105 million . At least , the workers of Ghana now know the President's priority.

In Burkina Faso 5.7 million Burkinabes have no access to clean water and 12.6 million lack adequate sanitation facilities. In some parts of the country only 2 percent of the population has access to clean toilets .

The government said it will use the African Development Bank, World Bank and bilateral donor funds to install 617,000 new toilets around the country, build 520 new pipe networks in rural areas, fit water taps in over 100,000 homes and install thousands of water-pumps.
"Finally the international community is realising that any development initiatives introduced in Burkina Faso must include investments in water, otherwise the Millennium Development Goals will be doomed to failure." the non-governmental organization WaterAid told IRIN.

The Draining of Health- workers

Socialist Banner has directed attention to the export of people and their skills and talents from African countries before ( here and here ) and yet another report on the problem has come to our attention that highlights the problem of the brain drain .

Poor working conditions and inadequate pay have driven away health professionals from developing countries, thereby undermining medical services, a conference to address the global shortage has noted. The deficit, the conference heard, had reached four million doctors, nurses, midwives and other healthcare professionals. Of these, one million are needed in Africa alone .

Some 57 countries, especially in Africa and Asia, are particularly affected and unable to effectively provide access to essential health services, prevention and information campaigns, drug distribution and other life-saving interventions such as immunisation, maternity care and treatment of several diseases. While Sub-Saharan Africa has 11 percent of the world population and 24 percent of the global burden of disease, it has only 3 percent of the world’s health workers. In Africa, 36 countries have fewer than 2.3 doctors, nurses and midwives per 1,000 people, mainly because of “brain drain” of trained personnel to developed countries. Only two countries have fulfilled a 2001 pledge by African countries to commit 15% of their national budgets to funding the health sector to meet the Millennium Development Goals. None of the East African countries have met that pledge. Uganda contributes 9.6%, while Kenya and Tanzania contribute only slightly more.

Uganda’s health minister, Stephen Malinga, said his country had lost more than 500 doctors and thousands of nurses, of whom 200 were working in South Africa. "Our neighbours have also taken them ... they are paid in dollars in Sudan and others with indispensable expertise have gone to Rwanda," he said. Those who opt to stay in Uganda, Malinga explained, were earning so little they could often not afford to pay the rent. Uganda thus had one doctor for 100,000 patients. [ An EU official said "The corruption index in Uganda, especially in the health sector, is still very high. I think health comes second after the Police in corruption.”]

Global Health Workforce Alliance said one in four doctors trained in Africa was working in western industrialised countries.

"They seek better employment and quality of life. Income is an important motivation for migration as well as better working conditions, career opportunities and more job satisfaction," Sigrun Mogedal, one of the conference organisers said.

The conference held out its begging bowl to solve the problem with the usual plea for funds - a 10-year global action plan to deal with the problem, which would require US$3.3 billion per year to train 1.8 million health workers in Africa for the next eight years. Another $27 billion would be required to pay them to stay. Needless to say , no solution , at all .

Not so healthy Africa

Poverty and war are harming advances in infant mortality, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, a new Unicef report on global child health has said. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 28 of the 30 countries with the highest mortality rates.

Sierra Leone was the worst performer, with 270 deaths before the age of five per 1,000 live births, in 2006 figures. In Sierra Leone one in four children will die before their fifth birthday. In Sweden it is one in 350. In Sierra Leone one in eight mothers will die in childbirth. In Sweden 0ne in 17,400 mothers die in childbirth and one in 8,200 in the UK. Sweden has one of the best staffed health services in the world. It has 320 doctors per 100,000 people compared to two doctors per 100,000 people in Sierra Leone.

In Sub-Saharan Africa the annual average rate of reduction in the child mortality rate between 1990 and 2006 was only 1% per year - meaning the rate will have to increase to 10.5% per year between 2007 and 2015 if the region is to meet the fourth MDG.

26,000 infants under five die every day around the world. They mostly die from preventable causes such as diarrhoea, malaria, malnutrition, mother-to-child transmission of HIV, unsafe water, poor hygiene and neonatal problems.
The solutions to child deaths are well-known, says the report - "simple, reliable and affordable interventions with the potential to save two-thirds of the children currently at risk are readily available". Such interventions that have already been shown to be effective include promoting breast-feeding, immunisation, vitamin A supplementation and the use of mosquito nets.

BOTTOM FIVE COUNTRIES/ DEATHS PER 1,000 LIVE BIRTHS
Sierra Leone: 270
Angola: 260
Afghanistan: 257
Niger: 253
Liberia: 235

A Remarkable Doctor

Samuel Kargbo stayed in Sierra Leone throughout the horrendous civil war. He brought basic health services and vaccines to children who lived in the rebel areas. He had to negotiate his way across checkpoints and his life was frequently at risk. Now he is one of just two doctors in a region of nearly 300,000 people. Having trained in Russia, Germany and the UK, Dr Kargbo could easily get a job overseas. But he refuses to leave.
"A lot of doctors who qualify in Freetown, go abroad", he said. "Some forget that the greatest need is here".
He earns around $200 - £100 - a month.

UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador , the England international football player , David Beckham said: “We can’t turn a blind eye to the tens of thousands of young children who die every day in the developing world mostly from causes that are preventable...Saving these children’s lives is a top priority for UNICEF and as an Ambassador I hope I can help to draw attention to this issue across the world.”

Socialist Banner , however , knows it takes more than well-meaning words from a millionaire sports star to change things . It is socialist revolution , not press releases , that will change how people will live or die .

The Millenium Goals

The United Nations agreed a set of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, with a view to tackling global poverty. Now, half-way to that deadline, the UN has produced a report showing how progress in meeting the goals .

Sub-Saharan Africa still trails behind other regions, with only 70% of children attending school.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest child mortality rate at 166 per 1,000, with Aids likely to be a major contributing factor.

In sub-Saharan Africa, a woman's risk of dying from complications during childbirth in her lifetime is 1 in 16, compared with 1 in 3,800 in the developed world. Many of these deaths could be prevented by access to skilled healthcare staff.

Deaths from Aids are still increasing in sub-Saharan Africa. By the end of 2006, 39.5 million people across the world were living with HIV, many in sub-Saharan Africa. Access to Aids treatment remains patchy, particularly in Africa.

Efforts to combat malaria and tuberculosis are making progress, although sub-Saharan Africa is lagging behind in both.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the absolute number of people without access to sanitation has actually increased.

Foreign aid to the least developed countries has, in effect, stalled since 2003 - despite the G8 agreement at the 2005 Gleneagles summit to double aid to Africa by 2010.

The number of people living on less than $1 a day fell , sub-Saharan Africa having made less progress.

In Malawi , Director for the UN Millennium Campaign, Salil Shetty, addressing a press briefing in Lilongwe said Malawi is among countries with the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.Shetty also bemoaned lack of progress on issues of human rights and status of women in the country.

The Fetishism of Money and Aid

Jeffrey Sachs, Nobel Prize winning economist and head of the Earth Institute at New York's Columbia University has said :

"Don't believe them when they say there is no money. There is more wealth than ever before. The money is just not getting channeled to people who are so poor that they are dying. There is no shortage of money in the world...Too much money is spent on meetings, conferences and workshops that lead nowhere. Money should be spent on concrete actions, instead. Development starts with money . First the financial resources should be made available; then systems should be put in place, paid for with those financial resources. The result would be "real paved roads, real electricity, real infrastructure."

How often do we hear it said, “we do not have the resources”? What is meant by resources is always money.

Every day politicians give lack of money as a reason why we cannot provide better health care or the many other public services that are in urgent need of improvement. Money is fetishised as having the power to solve problems because without it nothing can be done.
They ignore the fact that productive resources are materials, means of production, transport, energy, communications and networks of infrastructure through which goods and services are produced. And all these depend on one single resource which is labour. These are the real resources on which the lives of communities depend and there is an abundance of labour to provide for needs.

They are unable to see the availability of real resources because their minds are pre-occupied by the illusion that only money resources count. Reliance on the imagined powers of money runs through every social problem. They imagine that real resources can only be brought into use by money, whereas the opposite is the truth. The powers of the community to solve problems can on be fully released with socialism and the abolition of money.

Development plans like the United Nations Millennium Development Goals rely on the uncertainties of the market system and the use of money . Socialists say these promises are guaranteed to fail . Capitalism is concerned with profit-and-loss accounting, as its aim is to produce monetary profits . Plans in socialism would be drawn up as a list of the materials and labour required to satisfy the "Development Goal" .

William Morris said over a century ago:

"The palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless because they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast, wide-spreading, grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt at bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side."