UN issues report on development

Climate change and inequalities in health, education and income threaten to reverse progress made in the last 40 years to improve people’s lives. That’s according to the head of the UN Development Programme, Helen Clark, who launched the 2011 Human Development Report on Wednesday. The Index, which is the annual rankings of national achievement in health, education and income, covers a record 187 countries and territories.

“This report says the rate of progress we saw in the last 40 years cannot be maintained unless we get these equity, sustainability issues and challenges tackled,” Clark said. “ And the impact in the worst case scenario, which is put in this report, is that countries that are already low on the Human Development Index would see widening inequalities and very little progress if the challenges aren’t tackled.”

The author of the report Jeni Klugman said there is a huge gap between the top and bottom ranked countries.

“Life expectancy in the Democratic Republic of Congo is 48 years for someone born today while for someone born in Norway it is 81 years so it is a huge difference,” she said.”In schooling a child will go to school in Norway for 13 years while in the DRC it is 3 and a half years so there are stark differences.”

The report noted that although aid to poorer countries grew 23 percent from 2005 to 2009, it was still far short of the amount pledged by rich-world countries in recent years.

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