DEVELOPMENT: Quicker Pace Needed to Reach Social Goals

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 10 1998 (IPS) - Although some 90 countries are on track to meet their commitments to social development and gender equality over the next few years, many governments are still doing too little to combat poverty and inequality, according to a new report.

‘Social Watch 1998’, the second edition of an annual review published by the Uruguay-based Third World Institute, says that 10 countries already have met the measurable targets for improvements in health, education and development, set at the 1995 Social Summit at Copenhagen.

Another 40 nations are on schedule to meet their commitments by the year 2000, and 40 more countries are expected to follow in short order over the next few years.

The report adds, however, that progress toward meeting the Social Summit targets is “negligible or too slow” in some 30 countries, while seven nations actually posted worse social development indicators over the past year than at the beginning of the decade.

Overall, according to the coalition of national non- governmental organisations (NGOs) that contributed to the report ‘some 70 countries will not achieve these (Social Summit) aims without extraordinary effort,” although about half of the United Nations’ 185 member states are expected to do so under their current plans.

“While the goals targeted are feasible, many countries have failed to make sufficient effort,” writes Roberto Bissio, the managing editor of the Social Watch document. “The assistance promised has yet to materialise, the participation of citizens is paltry, and globalisation is not benefitting those who need it the most.”

Ten countries – Cyprus, Denmark, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, South Korea, Sweden and Tonga – have met the targets to cut child mortality, improve education, health and sanitation and raise life expectancy that were agreed to in Copenhagen, the report says..

By contrast, seven countries – Uganda, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Zambia, Papua-New Guinea, Congo-Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) – have actually gone backward since 1990 in achieving those goals.

In some concrete areas, the majority of countries studies are failing to maintain an adequate pace in improving their living standards. While the report found that 60 countries will meet the goal of cutting their illiteracy rates in half between 1990 and 2000, it calculated that 76 others would either not achieve that goal on schedule or had not improved its literacy rate at all between 1990 and 1994.

For several important goals, the report adds, there are no concrete timetables set at all – including any for the elimination of poverty, one of the central aims of the Copenhagen meeting.

“The complete elimination of poverty iis an ethical and a political imperative, comparable to the abolition of slavery over a century ago,” argues Bissio. “However, the international community has not established a deadline, date or concrete timeframe for completing this task.”

A study of anti-poverty efforts in several nations shows that poverty is reduced most effectively in countries that allow a “reasonably equable distribution of income” and “strong public spending on health and education,” says Constanza Moreira, coordinator of the Social Watch social sciences team.

“Betting solely on economic growth is not enough,” Moreira contends. “Concern with growth, coupled with the application of adjustment policies and curtailing of public social spending, has proven negative in terms of eradicating poverty.”

Governments have not only lagged in implementing social commitments, but also in meeting targets on human rights and women’s rights set earlier this decade, the report adds. Follow-up to the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, has also been lacking, according to Social Watch data.

Susana Chiarotti, regional coordinator of the Latin America and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Women, writes in the survey that government commitments to combat violence against women have not resulted in a reform in laws on sexual violence. These include laws applying to marriage partners, and on sexual harassment.

“In no country of the (Latin American) region are there databases capable of indicating the extent and the seriousness of violence against women,” she adds.

There is also a need in many Latin American countries to include a gender dimension in legal approaches toward violence, where, Chiarotti argues, “the language of these laws” still treats violence against women as “a genderless phenomenon” in which women could equally likely be culprits or victims.