POVERTY: MDG target will be met

The World Bank says that at least one of the Millennium Development Goals will be met. The Bank's latest Global Monitoring Report was released today. In the annual report, the Bank says the MGD to halve poverty by 2015 will be met. Meanwhile, the goals of halting the spread of AIDS, improving access to education and water, improving child and mother survival and gender equality goals will not be met by 2015 and the progress was slowed by the global recession.
"Poverty rates were falling in all regions, even in Africa the rate was falling about one percent a year," he noted.Portugal said progress made in the 1990s had reduced inflation, strengthened government finances and gave them better access to private capital markets."All those efforts prior to the crisis paid off," he told the press briefing. "It meant that countries were in a stronger position to respond to the crisis."As a result, the estimated 920 million people who will likely be extremely poor in 2015 should represent a cut nearly of nearly 50 percent from the 1.8 billion in such conditions in 1990, the World Bank noted."Based on these estimates, the developing world as a whole is still on track to achieve the first MDG of halving extreme income poverty from its 1990 level of 42 percent by 2015," it said.Asia has done a particularly good job of reducing extreme poverty, and has already seen the rate of extreme poverty plunge from nearly 55 percent of its population in 1990 to just under 17 percent in 2005.That level is expected to fall to 5.9 percent in 2015.
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