By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Oct 8 (IPS) – In a moment of rare candour, officials from a regional United Nations body and the Asia Development Bank (AsDB) admitted that studies to gauge progress of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are hampered by out-of-date information
“We are not surprised by this admission about a lack of information,’’ says Anoop Sukumaran, a researcher at Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank. ‘’We have been asking this question about reliable information from the very beginning.”
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Oct 8 (IPS) – In a moment of rare candour, officials from a regional United Nations body and the Asia Development Bank (AsDB) admitted that studies to gauge progress of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are hampered by out-of-date information.
The revelations came during the launch of a report to assess progress of countries in the Asia-Pacific region at midpoint to the 2015 deadline for achievement of the MDGs. The most comprehensive data available for the region’s MDG calculations is for 1999, the year before the Millennium Summit in September 2000 when the world’s leaders pledged to meet a series of development targets in the next 15 years.
‘’In many countries, the data provided at the national level is not reliable,’’ Raj Kumar, principal officer at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), based in Bangkok, told IPS. ‘’The most comprehensive, comparable figures we have for the Asia-Pacific region are for 1999.’’
It echoed the view of Pietro Gennari, chief of ESCAP’s statistic division, who presented the region’s MDG report card. ‘’There are still many data gaps in the MDG database. The data is scattered over time and across countries,’’ he said during the launch of the 56-page report published by ESCAP, the Manila-based AsDB and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
