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| September 5, 2005 | Monday | Rajab 30, 1426 |
Millennium goals lack awareness
AT the United Nations Millennium Summit, Pakistan signed the Millennium Declaration along with other 189 members. This year many countries have launched exercises to monitor progress on these goals. Unfortunately, five years later, Pakistan still seems to be at the preparation stage of translating the vision for Pakistan.
Except for a select few —-some NGOs, donor’s representative and government functionaries, and the team at the Planning Commission— the society at large knows nothing about the vision or the goals. Even business leaders who are expected to be at the forefront of economic transformation were found to be completely ignorant.
It is hard to imagine how these goals will be achieved without taking the private sector into confidence or mobilizing masses that were supposed to be the ultimate beneficiaries of this remarkable initiative.
In September 2000, the international community agreed to a unified vision of development. The leaders pledged to achieve the eight Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) by 2015.
The over-arching goal was to reduce the poverty by half at the end of the planned period of 15 years. The MGDs place human development at the centre of social and economic progress, and emphasizes the value of global partnership for development. A global partner, the Asian Development Bank, in its document, ‘Country strategy and programme update 2005-06-Pakistan’ posted on its website states: “Assessing recent progress in any of these areas is difficult. However, a recent government report shows progress on the MGDs, including education, health, and water supply access indicators, but the progress has to be accelerated to achieve the MDG targets”. It was not clear which specific report is referred to in the statement that has shown progress on goals in Pakistan. An education report card issued by the Asian South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education —a network of more than 200 organizations and individuals promoting adult education in the Asia Pacific region—and the Global Campaign for Education—a coalition of international and regional development NGOs, national coalitions and teachers unions in over 150 countries published this report.
The report called, ‘Must do better’ marks countries on five basic indicators: complete basic education, state action on free education, quality inputs, gender equality and overall equity. The report analyses if governments are delivering on their promises to provide free and quality basic education for all.
Using the format of a school report, this publication ranks leaders of 14 developing countries in the Asia Pacific region based on their actions to provide basic education for all. Unfortunately, this report placed Pakistan at the bottom of the group of 14 Asian countries.
Remarks at the end of the report that are addressed to the President Musharraf are as follows: Pervez spends less per pupil than most of his South Asian neighbours and charges user-fees in full. Such low spending can only deliver pitiable results; two out of three Pakistani adults are illiterate, with the same proportion of secondary school age children out of school; four out of 10 children are missing primary school; and girls and women constitute majority of those who are denied access to and equal chance for complete basic education. In addition, Pakistan’s primary school teachers are overworked and under-trained.
In all aspects, there is clearly little quality and state action and commitment in the public education he offers given the spending and the charges. This puts him at the bottom of the class too. Back to basics, Pervez!
The level of awareness regarding these goals amongst the stakeholders is low. “People in ministries might be informed. We, however, have not been taken into confidence. I frankly have not heard of it”, said Khalid Feroz, President Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “This has not been discussed in our forums so I cannot comment on millennium development goals”, Arshad Alam Khan, a leader of private sector and ex-VP of the Federation of Pakistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry responded when reached on phone. “Never heard of it”, said Qasim Teli, another business leader from Karachi.
All is not lost, however, for Pakistan. A recent publication of the Planning Commission, “Medium term development framework 2005-10” deals elaborately with the issue at hand. It carries a separate chapter, “Achieving millennium development goals”. A six-point strategy is outlined in the chapter to achieve the goals. It states, the strategy recognizes that:
“We are conducting an extensive survey and results will be out by this December. We did not want to make approximations that may prove to be misleading”, said Dr Akhtar. On the query as to why the private sector is ignorant of the exercise, he said , that the government is planning to launch provincial report on millennium development goals early next month in Karachi in which all stakeholders will be invited. The government’s explanation withstanding, the inclusion of the year 2005, however, would have made it easy to see the progress after the lapse of one third of the specified timeframe.
Though at this point in time, Pakistan is lagging in achieving the targets of development it has set for itself. The country actually has a fair chance to achieve targets in the next 10 years. The country’s GDP is growing at a robust rate of eight per cent and key macro economic indicators such as investment rate in agriculture and industry, local aggregate demand, imports, exports and regional and international business environment look favourable.
The current Pakistan Economic survey comments, “Pakistan is in the midst of an economic upturn”. People of the country are hardworking and ingenious. The government enjoys comfortable liquidity position. With paper work in place, all it needs is political will to set the ball rolling.
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