The MDGS in Asia and the Pacific: regional partnerships are key to addressing gaps in implementation.

• Author: Heyzer, Noeleen
• Position: Millennium Development Goals

Progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the Asian and Pacific region is uneven. We achieved success in some, but faltered in others. Even in areas of success, in-country and intra-country disparities persist. The pace of progress is too slow. Unless we act and accelerate it, 641 million people will continue to live on less than $1 a day; some 97 million children will remain underweight and 4 million will die before reaching the age of five; 400 million people in urban areas will have no access to basic sanitation; and 566 million in rural areas will live without access to clean water.

The destiny of Asia-Pacific is not to be poor. The region has the strengths, resources, knowledge and expertise to achieve the MDGs by 2015. It can provide the leadership to address the implementation shortcomings and financial gaps by harnessing the power of partnerships to make a difference. But time is running out and we must act now. Our research on tracking the countries' progress towards achieving the MDGs enables us to quantitatively rank the extent of "off-trackness" by indicators. We find that the three priority off-track areas are maternal and child health, water and sanitation, and the environment.

Despite some success in reducing income poverty, the region is still home to approximately 65 per cent of the world's poor. Many countries in South and South-East Asia are off track in achieving the targets for underweight children. Similarly, despite many more children surviving beyond their fifth birthday, and South-East Asia as a whole being on track, several countries are advancing too slowly. In fact, children's health, measured by the proportion of underweight children, is one of the region's biggest failures: 28 per cent of under-fives are underweight. This high rate is linked to other key challenges faced by the Asian and Pacific region, which is off track for 2015: poor health and low social status of women.

With 250,000 maternal deaths a year, the situation is simply not acceptable. These preventable deaths are caused by events as natural as pregnancy and childbirth. The region's overall maternal mortality ratio, at more than 300 per 100,000 live births, is over 30 per cent higher than that of Latin America and the Caribbean. Maternal deaths in Asia and the Pacific account for almost half the global total--and there is no indication that the ratio is declining significantly. This certainly is a result of persistent...