08 September 2005, Kabul Afghanistan: Human Development Report (HDR) for 2005 urges world leaders to promote fairer trade practices, to increase aid to the poor and to step up long-term peace building efforts in order not to miss the Millennium Development Goals as agreed at the Millennium Summit in New York five years ago.
The launch of the report comes a few days before the largest gathering ever of world leaders in New York to review the progress achieved since the Millennium Summit. Announcing the launch of the report, UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis said: “The world has the knowledge, resources and technology to end extreme poverty, but time is running out.”
According to data contained in the report, while 130 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty over the last few years, 2.5 billion people still live on less than $2 a day. Despite the progress in sending 30 more million children to school, 115 million remain without any opportunity to enroll in basic education.
The report draws a mixed picture of successes and shortcomings in terms of achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and stresses that fifty countries, half of them in sub-Saharan Africa are actually falling back in at least one of the goals.
The document, which also includes the Human Development Index, a set of basic indicators on life expectancy, literacy and gender issues, says 18 countries, 12 of them in sub-Saharan Africa and the others, members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, have recorded steep declines in their Human Development Index as compared to last year.
Afghanistan was not included in this year’s global HDR, due to the lack of comparable data that would allow a balanced comparison of Afghanistan with other countries. The data employed in the Afghanistan’s first National Human Development Report could not be utilized due to inconsistencies with the set of statistics used for the global HDR.
Human Development Reports have been published every year since 1990 by independent experts and sponsored by the UNDP.
Download PDF |English|
