October 15, 2006	Sunday	Ramazan 21, 1427

PESHAWAR: Making a belated start to track down the difficult path leading to the achievement of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Frontier province presents a bleak picture requiring a Herculean effort on the part of the government to put things in the right direction.

Efforts to put its house in order vis-à-vis initiating an organised attempt to achieve the MDGs by assessing the ground realities were started as late as 2005 - some five years after the UN Millennium Declaration was adopted in September 2000.

The provincial government made the first move towards the MDGs in 2005 and carried out a survey to assess the ground realities regarding seven out of eight goals the province is supposed to meet by 2015.

With the eighth goal — Develop a Global Partnership for Development — being a subject of the federal government, the provincial government’s MDGs survey 2005 focused on compiling data concerning the first seven MGDs — eradicating poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS/Malaria and other diseases and ensuring environmental sustainability.

The information collected from secondary sources, i.e. line departments of the provincial government and district governments, has reflected that the province lags far behind the targets and has to go a long way to cut down poverty, promote gender equality and improve maternal health conditions.

The poverty ratio in the NWFP having a population of about 20 million is as high as 43 per cent, and it has to cut it down to 13 per cent by 2015, still showing the province far behind the goal.

Similarly, the province continues to show poor performance as far as ensuring gender equality is concerned. However, there appears to be a ray of hope as the province recorded improvements in the health and education sectors due to the emphasis laid down by international donor in the two sectors.

“In the education and health sectors, the province has made significant improvement during the past few years and will comfortably achieve the targets concerning universal primary education and reduction in child mortality rate provided there is no change in the policy,” said a Peshawar-based representative of an international organisation engaged with the provincial government to assist meeting the MDGs by 2015.

Though the MDGs survey 2005 shows the province has made significant improvement in the health and education sectors, independent sources are sceptical.

They doubt the credibility of the data compiled by the NWFP Planning and Development Department.

“Unless data is available from primary sources through household surveys carried out on annual basis, the credibility of the information pouring in from secondary sources can hardly be trusted,” said a source in the provincial government.

A set of official documents available with Dawn also substantiates the argument.

For achieving the seven goals, the province is required to meet 11 targets for which some 34 indicators have been developed to assess the real progress against each of the goals by 2015.

The province does not have information pertaining to all the 34 indicators, which has made its job for MGDs all the more difficult.

In some cases, fresh information relevant to certain indicators is not available. Therefore, the government has to rely on information as old as 2001 and 2002.

Hence, drawing a prudent analysis of the present day picture to make an assessment and formulate strategies to move in the right direction would be a daunting task, sources said.

However, the good thing about the MDGs is that there is a growing realisation among the official circles who believe that the province cannot live in isolation and has to make progress towards achieving the MDGs.

“Without making progress on MDGs, the province will not be able to win credit lines from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, two major contributors to the province annual development programme,” said a source.

The government would shortly bring out a report on progress towards MDGs and has hired services of a consultant to analyse the situation concerning various sectors so that the government could design its future development strategies for achieving MDGs, said a development planner.

“The province will have to give up the tendency of formulating annual development plans on political consideration as without putting a serious effort to achieve MDGs on need basis, the cash strapped province will find it difficult to convince its foreign donors to continue giving it loans and doles,” the planner said.