As successive Human Development Reports have shown, most people in most countries are doing better in human development. Globalisation, advances in technology and higher incomes all hold promise for longer, healthier, more secure lives.

But there is also a widespread sense of precariousness in the world today. Improvements in living standards can quickly be undermined by a natural disaster or economic slump. Political threats, community tensions, crime and environmental damage all contribute to individual and community vulnerability.

The 2014 Report, on vulnerability and resilience, shows that human development progress is slowing down and is increasingly precarious. Globalisation, for instance, which has brought benefits to many, has also created new risks. It appears that increased volatility has become the new normal.

Khalid Malik. Photo Courtesy of UNDP

As financial and food crises ripple around the world, there is a growing worry that people and nations are not in control over their own destinies and thus are vulnerable to decisions or events elsewhere.

The report argues that human progress is not only a matter of expanding people’s choices to be educated, to live long, healthy lives, and to enjoy a decent standard of living. It is also about ensuring that these choices are secure and sustainable. And that requires us to understand – and deal with – vulnerability.

Traditionally, most analysis of vulnerability is in relation to specific risks, like disasters or conflicts. This report takes a wider approach, exploring the underlying drivers of vulnerabilities, and how individuals and societies can become more resilient and recover quicker and better from setbacks.

Vulnerability is a critical concern for many people. Despite recent progress, 1.5 billion people still live in multidimensional poverty. Half as many again, another 800 million, live just above the poverty threshold. A shock can easily push them back into poverty.

Nearly 80 percent of the world lacks social protection. About 12 percent, or 842 million, experiences chronic hunger, and nearly half of all workers – more than 1.5 billion – are in informal or precarious employment.

More than 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by conflict. Syria, South Sudan, Central African Republic are just some of the countries where human development is being reversed because of the impact of serious violent conflict. We live in a vulnerable world.

The report demonstrates and builds on a basic premise: that failing to protect people against vulnerability is often the consequence of inadequate policies and poor social institutions.

And what are these policies? The report looks, for instance, at how capabilities are formed, and at the threats that people face at different stages of their lives, from infancy through youth, adulthood, and old age.

Gaps in the vocabularies of children from richer and poorer families open up as early as age three, and only widen from there. Yet most countries do not invest much in those critical early years. (Sweden is a notable, good example.) Social spending needs to be aimed where and when it is needed most.

The report makes a strong call as well for the return of full employment as a central policy goal, as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Jobs bring social benefits that far exceed the wages paid. They foster social stability and social cohesion, and decent jobs with the requisite protections strengthen people’s ability to manage shocks and uncertainty.

At the same time, these broader policies may not be enough. The report calls for more responsive institutions and laws to make societies fairer and more inclusive. Tackling long-standing discrimination against ‘structurally vulnerable’ groups such as women and the poor requires a renewed effort to promote positive norms, the adoption of special measures and supportive laws, and ensuring more equitable access to social services.

Countries acting alone can do much to make these changes happen – but national action can go only so far. In an interconnected world, international action is required to make these changes stick.

The provisioning of public goods – from disease control to global market regulations – are essential so that food price volatility, global recessions and climate change can be jointly managed to minimise the global effects of localised shocks.

Progress takes work and leadership. Many of the Millennium Development Goals are likely to be met by 2015, but success is by no means automatic, and gains cannot be assumed to be permanent. Helping vulnerable groups and reducing inequality are essential to sustaining development both now and across generations.

Khalid Malik is lead author of the Human Development Report and UNDP Director of the Human Development Report Office.

The well known poetess Sugathakumari speaks at a meeting about sexual violence against women in Thiruvananthapuram. Credit: K.S. Harikrishnan/IPS

By K. S. Harikrishnan
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India , Mar 28 2013 (IPS)

Shaken by the brutal gang rape and murder of a young woman in the national capital New Delhi last December, the female workforce in India is calling for more concrete measures for the protection of female employees from both physical and non-physical attacks.

Although the Union Government has passed a bill in Parliament to protect female employees from sexual harassment in the workplace, women are demanding long-term measures to implement the law and punish the guilty.

A survey report by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India revealed that the rape case in Delhi, and the national outrage that followed, shook the confidence of the female workforce, not only in Delhi but also in other major cities like Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmadabad, Lucknow, Jaipur and Dehradun.

In February, the Indian Parliament approved a new law to prevent sexual harassment of women in the workplace and provide protection to women in both the government and private sectors.

According to the new legislation anyone who makes physical contact, sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, sexual remarks or shows pornography will be treated as the accused in any ensuing case.

Krishna Tirath, the minister of state for women and child development, told the lower house of parliament that elected representatives and society itself would have to implement the law for the protection of women in offices and companies.

According to the Indian constitution, sexual harassment infringes on women’s fundamental right to gender equality under Article 14 and her right to live with dignity under Article 21.

Still, the practice continues throughout the country. Studies and surveys have found that incidents of sexual harassment were high both in the government and the private sector.

A survey entitled ‘Sexual Harassment at Workplaces in India 2011-2012’ conducted in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmadabad, Lucknow and Durgapur, jointly released by Oxfam India and the Social and Rural Research Institute (SRI), said 17 percent of 400 respondents claimed that they had experienced sexual harassment on the job.

Respondents cited many reasons for not taking action against the perpetrator including fear of losing their job, absence of a proper complaint mechanism and fear of being stigmatised.

“In private organisations, sexual harassment is common,” Jameela, a typist in a private firm in Kannur, a city in the southern state of Kerala, told IPS.

“I experienced (sexual harassment) from my boss when I worked at a company in Chennai. When I resigned I cited the transfer of my husband, and other family matters,” she revealed.

The three jobs that appear to be most unsafe for women are as labourers, domestic workers and small-scale manufacturers.

Nurses in the healthcare sector are also extremely vulnerable to attacks and sexual advances while on the job.

Dr. P. P. Saramma, senior lecturer at the Thiruvananthapuram-based Sree Chitra Tirunal Medical Institute, told IPS that “indecent advances” towards nurses are very common in Indian hospitals.

“Nightshift nurses often face abuse and (stigma) — working with strangers and male patients leads to questions regarding their morality,” she added.

The results of a 2007 survey conducted in Kolkata among 135 health workers, including doctors, published in the U.K-based international health journal ‘Reproductive Health Matters’, showed that 57 percent of women staffers had undergone some form of sexual harassment in hospitals.

Analysing the increasing rate of sexual offences against women in their places of work, Dr. Sreelekha Nair, a researcher at the New Delhi-based Centre for Women’s Development Studies, said that sexual harassment is largely the result of a hierarchical power structure in society that strongly favours men.

According to the 2001 census, the Indian workforce is over 400 million strong, comprising 39 percent of the population of 1.2 billion. Over 50 percent of the labour force — 275 million workers – is male, and just 25 percent, or 127 million workers, is female.

The 2013 Human Development report, published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), showed that gender equality in India is among the worst in the world; and its performance was the worst in all of South Asia.

This gap in equality is most prevalent in the workplace, Nair said, where women are viewed as “secondary citizens”, forcing them to keep a low profile. But when they do begin to gain equal footing with their male counterparts, men often react with hostility, or violence.

Thus “the law is not the ultimate solution to sexual harassment – the mindset of the people needs to be changed through greater awareness”, she told IPS.

The rape case in Delhi, and the ensuing outrage, has brought a great deal of attention to the issue. The strong stand taken by the female workforce and a host of women’s organisations after the December incident pressurised the government, as well as businesses, to step up security measures for women staffers.

The climate of anger in the aftermath of that tragedy also fuelled awareness about the right to protest against harassment in the workplace and file complaints with the proper authorities.

Dr. Pushpa Kurup, managing director of Vitalect Technologies and convenor of the women’s forum of the National Institute of Personnel Management in Thiruvananthapuram, told IPS that the monitoring system for sexual harassment in the government and private sector has been strengthened since late last year.

“Effective training programmes are essential to sensitise all staffers to recognise sexual harassment, prevent it and deal with it when it does occur. Many complaints can be resolved effectively and positively through informal methods. It is critical that the complaints committee empathises with the complainant and not judge her by their own moral standards,” added she.

(END)

By Helen Clark
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 25 2013 (IPS)

On Tuesday, leaders of five large emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, known as the BRICS – will gather in Durban, South Africa to discuss harnessing their formidable resources on behalf of faster development progress in Africa and elsewhere.

UNDP Administrator Helen Clark. Credit: UNDP (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The summit’s intent is to promote global policy reforms, and to draw on their own national experiences and comparative advantages to help solve global problems.

The gathering is important: it is another sign that the world as we knew it is quickly changing.

High on the BRICS agenda is a commitment to kick-start the stalled Doha round of world trade talks and to push for fairer rules governing commerce in agriculture and other critical areas. The BRICS bloc will also be exploring ways to boost growth and overall development progress in Africa through expanded trade, investment, technology transfer, and financial support.

In one especially bold initiative under consideration, the five countries will examine proposals to create their own BRICS development bank.

The readiness of the BRICS countries to offer their own new international development initiatives and policy ideas is a clear manifestation of the changing global development landscape examined in UNDP’s newly released 2013 Human Development Report, “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World”. 

This dramatic change in global dynamics, however, goes well beyond the BRICS. More than forty developing countries are estimated to have made unusually rapid human development strides in recent decades, according to the Report. Together, they represent most of the world’s population and a growing proportion of its trade and economic output.

The progress of these fast mover countries measured in human development terms has accelerated markedly in the past decade. These geographically, culturally, and politically varied countries share a keen sense of pragmatism and a commitment to people, as seen through investments in education, health care, and social protection, and their engagement with the global economy. Neither rigid command economies nor laissez-faire free marketeers, they are guided by what works in their own national circumstances.

The BRICS countries themselves, while not alone, are key movers behind the rise of the South. As the 2013 global Human Development Report documents, they are contributing to development elsewhere in the South through trade, investment, and bilateral assistance. There are now many opportunities to harness the collective experiences of the rising South for the benefit of those countries not developing as fast.

The 2013 Report proposes convening a new “South Commission”, drawing on the pioneering example of the South Commission led in the late 1980s by Julius Nyerere, then president of Tanzania, and Manmohan Singh, now prime minister of India.

Through such a commission, leaders of the South could put forward their own recommendations for more inclusive and effective global governance in the 21st century.

As the BRICS summit demonstrates, the nations of the South are not standing still, waiting for reforms to happen in global governance. They are putting increasing energy and resources into newer instruments of political and economic co-operation, including regional institutions from Southeast Asia, southern Africa, and South America, to the Gulf States, the Caribbean, and West Africa’s ECOWAS group.

They have good reason to do so. If better coordinated, through what the 2013 Report terms “coherent pluralism,” with a clear consensus on shared goals, this evolving ecosystem of bilateral, regional, and international groupings can help advance sustainable human development in decades to come.

Multilateral action remains crucial for problems requiring global solutions – climate change is perhaps the most urgent example.

Yet the system of global governance devised in the mid-20th century is increasingly distanced from 21st century realities. China, for example, is the world’s second biggest economy, and holds more than 3 trillion dollars in foreign exchange reserves – more than all of Europe combined. Yet it has a smaller voting share in the World Bank than do France or the United Kingdom. Africa and Latin America also have issues of under-representation in important world fora.

The rise of the South does not imply an eclipse of the North. Human development is not a zero-sum game. People everywhere benefit from a healthier, better educated, more prosperous, and more stable world. A better-balanced North-South partnership can help achieve those goals.

A greater voice for the South also means greater responsibility, with shared accountability for solving problems and sustaining progress. A more engaged, successful South, meanwhile, helps the North, through its economic dynamism and collaboration on global challenges. As the 2013 Human Development Report says, the South still needs the North, but, increasingly, the North also needs the South.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 14 2013 (IPS)

The world’s 132 developing nations, largely part of the global South, are ascending at a pace “unprecedented in its speed and scale”, according to the latest Human Development Report (HDR) released Thursday by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP).

Khalid Malik. Photo Courtesy of UNDP

And “never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically, and so fast,” says Khalid Malik, lead author of the study and director of the HDR Office.

“Without doubt, the South’s three largest economies – China, India and Brazil – are driving forces in this phenomenon, due both to their sheer size and the recent speed of their overall human development progress,” he tells IPS.

By 2020, the combined economic output of the three leading developing countries alone will surpass the aggregate production of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the United States, says the 203-page study.

And “much of this expansion is being driven by new trade and technology partnerships within the South itself,” according to the HDR.

China has already overtaken Japan as the world’s second biggest economy while lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

India is re-shaping its future with new entrepreneurial creativity and social policy innovation, while Brazil is lifting its living standards through expanding international relationships and anti-poverty programmes that are being emulated worldwide, says the HDR.

Still, out of 187 countries, five of the top achievers in the Human Development Index are all from the North: Norway, Australia, the United States, the Netherlands and Germany.

The bottom five are from the developing world: Burkina Faso, Chad, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Niger.Rising living standards and education levels lead to greater expectations from, and demands on, governments.

Malik pointed out that the 2013 HDR identifies more than 40 developing countries – on all continents – that have performed much better than would have been predicted in HDI terms over the past two decades, with this progress accelerating notably in most since 2000, he added.

The study says the South is “developing at a pace unprecedented in human history, with hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty, and billions more poised to join a new global middle class.”

Asked if this phenomenon is largely confined to just the three leading countries while most developing nations are still lagging far behind in alleviating or eradicating poverty, Malik singled out the 40 countries categorised as being among the “human development high achievers”.

The 40 countries include Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Rwanda, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Viet Nam and Uganda.

Malik said the HDR looks in greater detail at 18 of the 40 countries, and their paths to human development improvement. 

He pointed out that the 2013 HDR also looks at the potentially highly positive impact of this phenomenon on today’s 47 least developed countries (described as the poorest of the poor), which include new markets, new sources of investment, better access to appropriate technologies, and, most important, many useful policy lessons.

“And while a number of low-income countries will miss their own national goals of halving extreme poverty by 2015, it is important to emphasise that the world as a whole has already met this target ahead of time, largely due to massive poverty eradication in many of the leading South nations since 1990,” he added.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: The rise of the global South includes countries such as Mexico, South Korea and Chile. But how do you justify their categorisation as part of the South when Mexico left the group of 77 developing nations to join the industrial world back in 1994, South Korea in 1996 and Chile in 2010? And do you still consider them part of the global South?

A: The terms “South” and “North” are used in the report to distinguish between the long-established advanced industrial nations (the latter) and more recently emerging economies.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, described as the rich man’s club)) does indeed include Mexico, South Korea, Chile and Turkey as well – all countries which belong nonetheless to the ‘South’ in that broad sense.

The geographical origins and connotations of the terms are of course inexact: Australia and New Zealand are rather counter-factually assigned to the ‘North’ for this purpose.

Q: The HDR takes a critical look at “global governance” – which includes multi-party democracy, human rights, transparency and accountability – as a political benchmark for the rise of the global South. If so, how do you account for the fact that China, considered by the West to be a non-democratic regime with the absence of rule of law and a free press, emerging as the world’s second biggest economy outranking Japan? Shouldn’t multi-party democracy be an integral part of economic progress in the South?

A: The 2013 report identifies more than 40 developing countries, China included, that have made remarkable human development gains in recent decades, with progress accelerating in the past 10 years. These countries represent a variety of national histories and evolving political systems. Most of these countries, though not all, would be characterised today as multi-party democracies.

The report argues strongly in favour of the importance of giving people a greater voice and opportunities for meaningful participation in civic life, which has long been central to the human development philosophy.

The report says further that rising living standards and education levels lead to greater expectations from, and demands on, governments, in terms of accountability, responsiveness, and effective delivery of social services.

The report also looks at the increasing importance of civil society in driving human development change in countries spotlighted in its ‘Rise of the South’ analysis.

That some East Asian and Latin American “developmental states” were not democracies in different stages of their development has prompted a misconception that the most effective developmental states are typically autocratic.

But evidence of the purported relationship between authoritarianism and development is scant. Democratic countries such the United States and post-World War II Japan were highly successful developmental states.

Since the 1950s, the Scandinavian countries have also acted as developmental states, where political legitimacy is derived from social services and full employment rather than from rapid growth. In Brazil, Mexico, Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, human development progress has accelerated since the consolidation of democratically elected civilian rule over the past two decades.

China’s political culture is fast evolving as living standards continue to rise, with an increasingly well-informed citizenry demanding greater government accountability. And India, a prime force in the Rise of the South, has been the world’s largest representative democracy for more than six decades.

Excerpt:

Though illegal, Nepali girls are often married off in their teens. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Oct 11 2012 (IPS)

Social activists in Nepal agree that the one reason why this impoverished country will miss the gender-linked Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the United Nations is the persistence of child marriage.

Nepal’s marriage law stipulates 20 years as the legal age for marriage for both sexes, but current records at the ministry of health and population show at least 23 percent of  girls getting married off at 15 – 19 years.

“Early marriage should be stopped because it not only affects girls’ education but also their health,” Sumon Tuladhar, education specialist at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), tells IPS.

While MDG 2 pushes for universal primary education, MDG3 seeks to promote gender equality and empower women. Child marriage works against MDG 4, that is concerned with reducing child mortality, as also MDG 5 that aims to improve maternal health.

“We certainly need to strongly lobby against early marriage, but we are hampered by a very poor monitoring system to implement the existing law,” Dibya Dawadi, deputy director-general in the department of education, told IPS.

But, for both the government as well as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with child marriage, enforcing the law is a dilemma because legal action means prosecuting the parents.

“Sticking a mother in jail is not helpful when she may have other young children with no one to feed and protect them,” Helen Sherpa from World Education, an international NGO, tells IPS.

Activists, however, believe that change should tackle the root of the problem – their economic situation, because daughters provide valuable help in the household and on the farms in the rural areas.

“Our biggest challenge is the family’s attitude towards educating their girls,” says Dawadi.

Many rural families marry off their daughters at the age of 11 – 13 because the older a girl gets the higher the dowry demand.

Kamala Chepang was married off at 13 because her parents could not afford to educate all their children.

“I see my young siblings going to school and this makes me happy,” Kamala told IPS in the remote Shaktikhor village of Chitwan district, 300 km southwest of the capital.

Thousands of young girls like Kamala, especially from the most marginalised communities like the Chepangs, are unable to continue their education due to poverty, social barriers and a lack of schools in the remote rural areas.

Although the trend of sending young daughters to their husbands’ home has changed and most of them stay with their mothers till they reach 16, their lives change drastically after marriage and they rarely return to school.

“After marriage, these girls rarely come back to school and even if they do, their performance is very poor,” says Tuladhar from UNICEF. “Early marriage negatively impacts their self confidence.”

According to UNICEF, 51 percent of Nepalese were married as children. Nepal’s 2006 demographic and health survey found that among Nepalese women in the 20 – 49 age group, 60 percent were married by the time they reached 18.

Nepal scores poorly on gender disparity. In 2011  Nepal stood 126^th out of 135 countries in the ‘Global Gender Gap’ index of the  World Economic Forum.

“Early marriage changes a girl’s life options because parents no longer want to invest in ‘someone else’s property’,” says Kaman Singh Chepang, an activist from Nepal Chepang Association, an NGO working for the Chepang community.

Dire poverty and lack of government initiatives to get girls to school are among reasons that Chepang cites for the situation of girls in Nepal, a country where more than half of a total population of  30 million people live on less than 1.25 dollars a day.

Chepang believes that if child marriage is to be eradicated there should be close coordination among government sectors dealing with health, education, poverty and culture and also give priority to basic schooling. “But the government is unready for any such initiative.”

In the remote villages, girls may have to walk hours to reach their classrooms, and by the time they return home they are too exhausted to do their homework. In the end, they just drop out and help their parents until they are married off.

Child marriage not only denies girls an education, it often makes them vulnerable to a cycle of discrimination, domestic violence and abuse. By being made to bear children when they have barely attained puberty, they are forced to put themselves and their babies at risk, activists say.

“Child marriage is extreme denial of children’s rights. Many girls also suffer from abusive marriages as they are married to older boys,” said Sherpa from World Education.

By Mekonnen Teshome and Miriam Gathigah
ADDIS ABABA , Feb 21 2012 (IPS)

Ethiopia says that the double-digit economic growth the country has experienced over the last seven years has started benefitting its majority by boosting their income and productivity in agriculture and small-scale businesses.

While the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank state that the country has registered 8.7 percent GDP growth, the government claims the economy has grown by 11.4 percent.

However, the country was declared the second-fastest growing economy in Africa for 2011, after Ghana, in the annual economic report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

In the past, Ethiopia has made headlines for recording some of the worst famine situations in Africa, and for its poor health indicators – it has posted one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. In 2005, 871 women died per 100,000 live births.

But this is slowly changing as the government has made progress in the provision of social services such as health, education and infrastructure.

“In 2010, Ethiopia continued to register the fast growth, as it has for the last five years. GDP growth in 2010 remained strong at 8.8 percent. Growth is driven by the service sector (14.5 percent), followed by the industrial (10.2 percent) and agricultural (six percent) sectors,” the ECA report indicated.

In an exclusive interview with IPS, State Minister of the Office of Government Communication Affairs, Alemayehu Ejigu, said Ethiopia has registered remarkable growth by increasing major crop production from 11.9 percent in 2005 to 18.08 percent by the end of 2010. People’s lives are changing for the better in rural and urban areas because of health facilities and infrastructure development, he said.

Ejigu attributed the success to the effective implementation of the national five-year Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP). He said that the country’s GTP for 2011 to 2016 would help Ethiopia join the grouping of middle-income countries.

Ejigu also told IPS that the government planned job creation opportunities through the construction of 73,000 kilometres of rural roads. “This would create an opportunity for farmers to easily transport agricultural products to market,” Ejigu said.

Abeba Bezu, an economic affairs consultant in Addis Ababa, said that under the country’s ambitious Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty government had reduced poverty from 38.7 percent in 2005 to 31 percent five years later.

“Although struggling with a large population estimated to be 82 million people, making it the second-most populous country in Sub-Saharan Africa, there has been significant progress towards improving livelihoods. There is notable development.”

However, assistant Professor Teshome Adugna at the Economics Department of the Ethiopian Civil Service University cautioned that as GDP considers the market value of goods and services, it cannot be a perfect instrument to show the country’s actual growth, given Ethiopia’s poor record handling and management systems.

“Since the GDP reporting does not provide information on who produces how much, it is difficult to know how individual citizens benefit from the reported growth,” he said.

Adugna described Ethiopia’s growth as “broad-based”, which he attributed to the growth of the agricultural, industrial and service sectors.

“Of course, we should not expect urban unemployment to end very shortly,

“I can say that many people are benefiting from the economic growth in Ethiopia, but I would not say that the life of the majority has improved. We need time to bring about social development that can change the lives of the majority.”

Ten years ago, only two thirds of Ethiopians had access to healthcare services, leaving another 68 million people across the expansive rural areas in dire need.

“Since 2004, the Ministry of Health has expanded access to healthcare through the Health Extension Programme (HEP), which targets the rural population,” said Amanuel Ayalew, a volunteer health worker in northern Ethiopia.

As a result, Ethiopia’s country report by the Department for International Development (DFID), the United Kingdom’s government department responsible for promoting development and poverty reduction, revealed that the impact of the health programme is notable since HEP reaches nine million households. DFID will spend an average of 524 million dollars per year in Ethiopia until 2015.

With more than 35 million insecticide-treated bed nets for malaria, there has been a 73 percent reduction in malaria cases. This, coupled with a massive and consistent vaccination programme for children under five against killer diseases, has seen deaths in that age group reduced by a significant 62 percent in villages with access to HEP.

There are now about 1.4 million more women on contraceptives than there were in 2005, and the gross primary school enrolment rate has risen from 91.3 to 96 percent between 2005 and 2010.

However, challenges remain.

“In spite of a constituent economic growth of double digits in the last five years with economic analysts projecting a similarly impressive growth, sustainable growth and poverty reduction remains a challenge,” Bezu said.

A majority of rural poor are still grappling with severe climate change and are still highly susceptible to drought.

It is a situation that government partially acknowledges. “When we say the country is growing it does not mean that every citizen has no problem…even in the United States there are people who are provided with food aid,” Ejigu said. He, however, added that no one would die of starvation as there would be no food shortages in the country.

It is a view that the leader of the opposition Ethiopian Democratic Party, Mushe Semu, does not agree with.

“Ethiopia is a country where many citizens are starved. It is not a question of having food two or three times a day,” Semu told IPS.

He said it was impossible for Ethiopia to become a middle-income country. “When we think of the majority of the Ethiopian population we are talking about our farmers and rural communities that are 85 percent of the people. Here, the land management and fertility should be considered,” he said.

He said that without effectively distributing all arable land to people, and with the prevailing land degradation, it was not possible to bring about development.

The country is not conducive for private sector growth, analysts say.

The newly completed African Union building in downtown Addis Ababa. Credit: Mekonnen Teshome/IPS

“Although the government envisions a private sector led development, the environment is not conducive for the growth of the private sector. In fact, private investment as a percentage of GDP has remained on the decline since 2004,” Bezu said.

In a World Bank global survey dubbed Ease of Doing Business, in 2010 and 2011 Ethiopia ranked 103 and 104 respectively out of 183 countries.

But meanwhile, civil servant Abiy Getahun said that the double-digit economic growth repeatedly propagated by the government media has not yet brought the desired social development to his life. He cited the low wages paid in Ethiopia, which, according to him, are low compared to the rest of Africa. In the 2011 U.N. Development Programme’s Human Development Report Ethiopia ranks 174 out of 187 countries worldwide.

He said that most people, especially urban dwellers, could not withstand the skyrocketing price of good and services.

“The total salary increment I got over the last 10 years is only 400 Ethiopian Birr (less than 25 dollars) while the price of goods and services has risen in an unbelievable manner.”

* Additional reporting by Miriam Gathigah in Nairobi.

(END/2012)

Excerpt: