Progress on UNFPA-related Millennium Development Goals

At the midpoint between the adoption of the MDGs and the 2015 target date, progress analysis show that there have been some gains and that success is still possible in many parts of the world. However, progress on the Goals is far from uniform. There are huge disparities among and within countries. Some countries are on track to meet most, if not all, of the MDGs and many will reach at least some of the MDGs. Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing a continuing rise in extreme poverty and stunningly high child and maternal mortality rates. Asia is the region with the fastest progress, but even there hundreds of millions of people remain in extreme poverty. Other regions have mixed records: in Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe there has been slow or no progress on some of the Goals and persistent inequalities undermining progress on others.

Some of the results from the 2007 MDG Progress Analysis related to UNFPA's work include:

1. Net enrolment ratio in primary education in the developing regions increased to 88 per cent in the school year 2004/2005, up from 80 per cent in 1990/1991. Although sub-Saharan Africa has made significant progress over the last few years, it still trails behind other regions, with 30 per cent of its children of primary school age out of school.

2. Girls are still excluded from education more often than boys, a pattern that is particularly evident in Western and Southern Asia.

3. Women's participation in paid, non-agricultural employment has continued to increase slowly. The greatest gains are in some of the regions where women have the least presence in the labour market — in Southern Asia, Western Asia and Oceania.

4. Wage employment in most of Africa and in many parts of Asia and Latin America is concentrated in urban areas.

5. Attendance at delivery by skilled health personnel (doctors, nurses, midwives) who are trained to detect problems early and can effectively provide or refer women to emergency obstetric care when needed is essential to reduce maternal mortality. The regions with the lowest proportions of skilled health attendants at birth are Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, which also have the highest numbers of maternal deaths.

6. In Africa and Asia, haemorrhage is the leading cause of maternal death, while in Latin America and the Caribbean, hypertensive disorders during pregnancy and childbirth pose the greatest threat. In Asia, anaemia is a major contributor to maternal deaths, but is a less important cause in Africa and a negligible factor in Latin America.

7. Contraceptive prevalence increased slowly from 55 per cent in 1990 to 64 per cent in 2005, but remains very low in sub-Saharan Africa, at 21 per cent.

8. Preventing unplanned pregnancies alone could avert around one quarter of maternal deaths, including those that result from unsafe abortion. Still, an estimated 137 million women have an unmet need for family planning. An additional 64 million women are using traditional methods of contraception with high failure rates.

9. Globally, 4.3 million people were newly infected with HIV in 2006, with Eastern Asia and the CIS showing the fastest rates of infection. In Southern and South-Eastern Asia, people are most often infected through unprotected sex with sex workers. The use of non-sterile injecting drug equipment remains the main mode of HIV transmission in CIS countries.

10. As of December 2006, an estimated 2 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy in developing regions. This represents 28 per cent of the estimated 7.1 million people in need.

11. Though sub-Saharan Africa is home to the vast majority of people worldwide living with HIV (63 per cent), only about one in four of the estimated 4.8 million people there who could benefit from antiretroviral therapy are receiving it.

Source: United Nations, 2007