Moscow, Russia (6 July 2009) -- Development progress in the Commonwealth of Independent States has declined, in part as a result of the on-going global economic and financial crisis. The Millennium Development Goals Report 2009, launched in Geneva by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, says that in almost all areas, the two groups of countries that are part of the CIS—one in Asia and the other in Europe—have experienced a very different pace of progress. Read: Russian Language Version of Article Read: Millenium Development Goals Report 2009.
Levels of extreme poverty, which had risen over the 1990s in both groups and more than tripled in the Asian ones, have since then declined in the whole CIS region (comprising former Soviet republics). However, while the European side has already reached the target of halving extreme poverty, with only 0.3 percent of the population living on less than $1.25 a day, in the Asian CIS, progress has been slow and 19 percent of the population still live in extreme poverty.
The progress observed up to 2007 in the decrease of the proportion of working poor and those in insecure – and often unpaid – employment was reversed in 2008. According to projections by the International Labour Organization, the proportion of working poor in the region, after a decrease between 1997 and 2007, from 26 to 21 percent, is expected to rise again to 23 percent.
A Mixed Picture on Achievements
The MDG Report says that the CIS countries as a whole have already reached gender parity in education. The pace of progress in primary school enrolment, however, is not sufficient for the group of Asian CIS countries to meet the target of universal primary education by 2015.
In the Asian CIS, meeting the target of reducing hunger is now being threatened by the current crisis. Already, the current rate of reduction in the prevalence of undernourished people has been insufficient to meet the target by 2015, and could be slowed down even further, given the global crises.
Rates of child mortality remain relatively high in the Asian CIS. A decrease from 78 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 35 deaths in 2007 is not sufficient to put the group of countries on track to meet the target of reducing mortality rates by two-thirds for children under five. And even for the European CIS, the rate of progress has been so far insufficient to meet the target.
The report says that the target of halving the 1990 tuberculosis prevalence and death rates by 2015, established by the Stop TB strategy, will not be met. There was a sharp rise in the prevalence of tuberculosis in the CIS over the 1990s and rates have yet to return to return to their 1990 level. The most important and widely carried out element of the Stop TB strategy is the detection and treatment method known as DOTS. The detection rate was 63 percent for the world in 2007, but only 51 percent in the CIS region. And the treatment success rate, which reached 85 per cent for the world in 2006, was only 64 percent in the region.
The MDG Report points out that the CIS countries had high levels of carbon dioxide emissions in 1990—at that time the highest among regions, with the exclusion of the rich countries. Since then, emissions have gone down, but remain the second highest level after the developed regions and Eastern Asia. The Millennium Development Goals Report is the most comprehensive global MDG assessment to date. It is based on a set of data prepared by over 20 organizations both within and outside the United Nations system, including the World Bank and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The project is overseen by the UN Secretariat’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs. For more information, see www.un.org/millenniumgoals or http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/.
