Development & Aid, Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Health, Poverty & SDGs

DEVELOPMENT: ‘Almost Half the Goals Getting Forgotten’

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Oct 7 2005 (IPS) - Almost half the Millennium Development Goals are not even getting talked about enough, a leading Pakistani doctor engaged in maternal health says.

Maternal health is addressed by goals three, four and five of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Dr Farkhanda Ather from Pakistan who has been engaged actively with maternal health issues told IPS. These are to promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, and more specifically also to improve maternal health.

Dr Ather was in London to address a meeting on ‘The Women the World Forgot’ organised by the non-governmental organisation Interact Worldwide.

”In Pakistan goal five would mean reduction of maternal mortality by three-quarters from 1990 to 2015,” she said. ”But there has been no big change through these years. There are only nine years left, and we are not on track.”

In 1990 Pakistan had a maternal mortality of between 340 and 500 per 100,000 births,” she said. ”In some areas like Baluchistan it is extremely high, up to 700. In Afghanistan it is more than a thousand.”

The other goals are to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and more broadly, to develop a global partnership for development. The heads of government who agreed these goals in 2000 set the year 2015 as the date for meeting specific targets.

Among these goals, the ones relating to maternal health seem to be getting least priority, Dr Ather said. The United Nations summit last month was only one indication of this, she said.

”We are quite dissatisfied with what went on,” she said. ”It was other agendas that came up, this issue did not get as much attention as necessary.” The UN took up other issues like terrorism that are not a part of the MDGs. ”Those are important issues, but should not be taken up at the cost of MDGs,” she said.

As seen from the experience of a professional working hands on with what the MDGs are about, the goals present a quite distant picture.

”Ninety-nine percent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries,” she said. ”Emergency and obstetric care in the developed countries is much better.” And yet there was little new support coming for developing countries in this field.

”Forget doing more, countries are not even doing what they have agreed so far to do,” she said.

”And don’t forget, for every one death there are 30 other who suffer from complications, some of them life-long,” Dr Ather said. ”Fistula (an abnormal opening of the vaginal or anal passage), for example, makes social acceptability very hard because women lose control over urine and faeces, and people don’t accept the condition. The women are prone to infections all their life, and they become infertile.”

In Pakistan, she said, ”there are a lot of unwanted pregnancies. You have a lot of unsafe abortions because of unwanted pregnancies, so why not try to avoid the unwanted pregnancies.”

Only 34 percent of Pakistani couples use contraceptives, she said. And that number is not rising fast enough.

”The New York summit could have focused on generating more funds, on advocacy, on lobbying,” she said. ”Because people don’t know much about these issues, and if that is the case, how will you achieve these goals?”

In Bangladesh the situation is better because unsafe abortions have been properly addressed, she said.

But Pakistan has progressed on other fronts, Dr Ather said. ”Infant mortality in 1990 was 110 per 1,000 births, now it is down to 79. The birth rate has come down from 3.9 to 1.9 from 1990 to 2005, which is very good.”

Significant success is possible if the issues are given the attention and resources needed, she said.

”Five years ago, the world’s nations signed up to the UN Millennium Development goals, aimed at halving world poverty by 2015,” Interact Worldwide chief executive Ros Davies said in a statement.

”The goals are ambitious, but they are simple and achievable. In rich countries one in 4,000 women dies during pregnancy while in poor countries one in 17 women die.”

Davies added: ”We owe it to the 529,000 women who die every year from pregnancy related complications to ensure that this summit honours the promises made five years ago. It may be world leaders who take the decisions which can save these women’s lives, but it is ordinary citizens like us who must hold them accountable.”