Millennium development goals could be missed - World Bank

Sub-Saharan Africa is in danger of not meeting global goals to reduce hunger, poverty and disease by 2015, according to a report issued by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday.

African countries could also fail to achieve targets for cutting child and maternal mortality and achieving universal education if current trends continued, it added.

"The credibility of the entire development community is at stake as never before," said James Wolfensohn, the bank’s president, at the launch of the report in Washington.

"At stake are not just the prospects for hundreds of millions of people to escape poverty, hunger and disease, but also prospects for long-term security and peace, which are intrinsically tied to development," he added.

The report, entitled "The Global Monitoring Report 2005: From Consensus to Momentum", is a five-year stocktake of Africa’s progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), set at a UN summit in September 2000 and endorsed by more than 180 world leaders.

Its conclusions will be discussed at the G8 Summit in July in Gleneagles, Scotland.

It said the entire continent, the world’s poorest - where over 300 million live on less that US $1 a day – would miss the goals completely.

"Rich countries must now deliver on the promises they have made in terms of aid, trade and debt relief, and the developing countries - especially in sub-Saharan Africa - need to aim higher and do better in terms of their own policies and governance, and to make more effective use of aid," Wolfensohn said.

"Behind cold data on the MDGs are real people, and lack of progress has real and tragic consequences," the World Bank’s Zia Qureshi, the report’s main author, said in the report.

"Every week, 200,000 children under five die of disease," he added. "Every week 10,000 women die giving birth. In sub-Saharan Africa alone this year, two million people will die of AIDS. Worldwide, more than 100 million children in developing countries are not in school."

In the report, the bank and the IMF called for a five-point strategy to help Africa achieve the MDGs by the target year of 2015.

The strategy involves major reform of agricultural trade policies and a doubling of development aid to Africa over the next five years, from current levels of $26 billion a year.

It also called on African governments to encourage greater private-sector growth, and to rapidly increase the numbers of health-care workers and teachers.

According to Anne Krueger, the IMF’s deputy managing director, to cut poverty in half by 2015, sub-Saharan Africa needs to increase economic growth rates to 7 percent over the next decade – twice current levels.

Prospects for achieving the MDGs related to health were the least encouraging, the report added, with Africa needing to triple its health workforce by 2015.

The report is available at: www.worldbank.org