There is a bad news: India may not be able to meet Millennium Development Goals for Women and Children’s health by the target year of 2015. In fact, the first report of the UN Secretary General’s independent expert review group has revealed that unless causes are urgently addressed — most of the world will fail to meet MDG goals.
The report on information and accountability for women’s and children’s health to be launched on Wednesday at the UN General Assembly estimates that only 13 of 75 countries like Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, Guatemala, Liberia, Madagascar, Morocco, Nepal Peru, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam are on track to reach MDG 4 and only 4 countries are on track to reach MDG 5: China, Egypt, Morocco and Peru.
“Unless those causes are more urgently addressed globally and in countries, Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4 (child survival) and 5 (maternal and reproductive health) will not be met by most nations by the target year of 2015,” cited a special release by the reputed British Medical Journal, the Lancet.
The report suggests that as far as under-five mortality rate is concerned, India has made “insufficient progress.” However, India is “making progress” in Maternal Mortality Ratio. Experts say that among women, to achieve MDG 5, the annual rate of maternal mortality must decline must be 5.5 per cent. But worldwide, the decline has only been 1.9 per cent since 1990.
According to the Lancet, declining rates of donor funding and a failure to target resources to the countries with the greatest need could have devastating consequences for the survival of millions of women and children worldwide. The key findings of the iERG’s report suggest that there are worrying signs that donor and country financial commitments to women’s and children’s health are declining. “The distribution of commitments to countries with the highest burdens of women’s and children’s mortality are disturbingly uneven, revealing deep and troubling inequities in health care. Among children, the major preventable and still neglected causes of death are increasingly concentrated in the newborn period (3.1 million deaths). Substantial numbers of preventable deaths also take place in the post neonatal period — 1.1 million deaths from pneumonia, 0.75 million deaths from diarrhoea, and 0.56 million deaths from malaria,” added the report.
Among women, the decline in maternal mortality falls well short of that needed to reach MDG-5, the report cites.