A new report has given Africa a thumbs up for making great strides towards achieving of some Millennium Development Goals as the 2015 comes closer.

The MDG African Progress Reports shows that the continent is on track towards achieving universal primary education, global partnership for development, promoting gender parity and empowering women and combating Hiv/Aids, TB, malaria and other diseases, which are listed as MDGs 2, 8, 3 and 6 respectively.

However, the report says the continent is still grappling with MDGs 1, 4, 5, and 7, — poverty and hunger eradication, reduction of child mortality, improved maternal health and ensuring environmental sustainability respectively.

Globally in 2012, 15 of the 20 countries that made great progress on the MDGs were in Africa.

In Africa, the report says, Benin, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Malawi and Rwanda are making impressive progress on a number of goals.

Rwanda leads the pack in East Africa, with the report indicating that the country is on track towards achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and women empowerment, reduction of child mortality, improving maternal health and spearheading global partnership for development.

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Rwanda is the only country in East Africa that has registered success in empowering women after introducing a 30 per cent quota for female Members of Parliament in 2003. The country now has the biggest participation of women in parliament in the world, with around 56 per cent of Members of Parliament being women.

Tanzania is also on track towards achieving universal primary education while Kenya and Uganda scored highly in a global partnership for development MDG.

However, while Africa is the world’s second fastest growing region, the rate of poverty reduction is insufficient to reach the target of reducing extreme poverty by half in 2015.

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The report, jointly funded by the African Union, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the United Nations Development Programme and the African Development Bank, shows that extreme poverty has declined faster since 2005 than in the period between 1990 and 2005. However, the report added that the pace is not fast enough to reach the target by 2015.

“The proportion of people living in extreme poverty in Southern, East, Central and West Africa as a group fell from 56.5 per cent in 1990 to 48.5 per cent in 2010; about 20.25 percentage points off the 2015 target compared with just 4.1 points for South Asia,” says the report.

Africa’s sluggish poverty reduction, the report says, is due to its lower economic growth.

Goal 1 aims to reduce poverty and hunger and increase gainful employment. Poverty in Africa exists predominantly in rural areas, where it is estimated to be at least three times higher than in urban areas in several countries.

With less than 1,000 days to the 2015 deadline, the report takes stock of Africa’s overall performance on the MDGs and identifies the best performing countries by indicator, based on progress relative to each country’s initial conditions.

On Goal 2 — achieving universal primary education — prospects are good, but the quality of education is still low, contributing to low completion rates.

“Some 30 per cent of students with six years of schooling cannot read a sentence, and girls are more likely to drop out than boys,” reads the report.

Sarah Ruto regional manager of Uwezo East Africa, a regional initiative focused on monitoring educational progress, says attending primary school is becoming the norm, but the quality of education remains a challenge.

“Governments should first come up with a mechanism of addressing the issues of teachers’ professionalism, which is lacking in most schools, absenteeism for both teachers and students and change in school curricula” said Mrs Ruto.

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African countries continue to register progress in primary school enrolment, which went up from 64 per cent in 2000 to 87 per cent in 2010.

Save for North Africa, primary school enrolment rose, from 58 per cent to 76 per cent, an annual increase of 1.5 per cent.

“North Africa’s enrolment rose from 88 per cent to 96 per cent, reflecting a narrowing difference (by 10 percentage points) between that region and the rest of Africa,” says the report.

However, the average primary completion rate rose from 54 per cent in 2000 to 71 per cent in 2010, an annual increase of 1.7 per cent.

In countries with lower initial primary completion rates, progress was greater. For example, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Mozambique improved their primary completion rates annually by 4.9, 4.7 and 4.4 percentage points, respectively, between 2000 and 2010.

Ghana, Morocco, Tanzania and Zambia, whose primary completion rates exceeded the regional average in 2000, also featured among countries that made major strides.

The report shows that progress on Goal 3 — promotion of gender equality and empowering women — is encouraging, with many countries achieving outstanding performance, especially on gender parity in primary schools and the number of seats women hold in national parliaments.

“Promoting better access for women to paid non-agriculture jobs remains a challenge, but Africa is seeing progress on that front as well,” says the report.

Africa performed better than Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and West Asia in narrowing the gender disparity in primary schools over the past two decades, trailing only South Asia.

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“Despite the progress, disparities exist between and within countries — for instance, the gender parity index is higher for high-income areas than low-income ones,” noted the report.

African countries have also progressed substantially towards reducing under-five deaths by two-thirds by 2015, but current progress is not enough, and Africa overall is unlikely to meet its target.

Although the continent continues to steadily reduce its under-five mortality rate, having gone from 146 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 91 in 2011, it is not enough to meet the target.

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Factors contributing to Africa’s inadequate progress, according to the report, include weak health systems and poor conditions, which include household education, income, insufficient and inappropriate nutrition practices and poor sanitation facilities.

Among African regions, North Africa progressed most in reducing under-five mortality rate over the 1990 to 2011 period, from 89 deaths per 1,000 live births to 41 in 2011, a 54 per cent decrease, followed by Southern Africa (46 per cent) and 42 per cent in West Africa and East Africa.

Central Africa had the continent’s highest under-five mortality rate in 2011, at 139 deaths per 1,000 live births.

This could be due partly to malaria, which accounts for more than 18 per cent of under-five deaths in Central Africa, against an average of just 7.5 per cent in other regions according to Unicef, 2012 report.

“By scaling up proven, cost-effective and high-impact interventions, systematically reducing bottlenecks in health systems and improving social determinants of health, Africa can speed up the progress,” says the report.

Despite some progress in the maternal mortality ratio between 1990 and 2010 — a 42 per cent reduction, from 745 deaths per 100,000 live births to 429— Africa still has the world’s largest burden of maternal deaths, at 56 per cent of the global burden in 2010.

According to Shanaaz Shariff, Kenya’s Director of Public Health, remarkable success has been achieved in the fight against HIV/Aids, TB and malaria.

The government’s bed nets with programme has largely helped prevent malaria and the better access to antiretroviral drugs has helped suppress the deaths caused by HIV/Aids.

“Also much has been done by the government to prevent mother-to-child-transmission, currently all pregnant women with HIV/Aids virus are put on anti-retroviral treatment to prevent transmission of the virus to their unborn children,” said Dr Shanaaz adding that this has drastically reduced the number of HIV infections among new-borns.

The report states that Botswana, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Lesotho, Somalia, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe recorded maternal mortality rise.

HIV/Aids is the main cause of this rise in the southern African countries, and once anti-retroviral therapy became available, their maternal mortality ratios started to drop.

“At 429 deaths per 100,000 live births that year, or an estimated 164,800 maternal deaths, Africa has the world’s highest maternal mortality ratio. In fact, Africa accounts for the 10 countries with the highest ratios,” the report notes.

“A major reason for Africa’s high maternal mortality the report indicates, is that few infants are born in the presence of skilled attendants.”

The lack of skilled birth attendants contributes to 2 million maternal, stillbirth and newborn deaths each year worldwide.

On Goal 6 of combating HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases, 10 countries with generalised epidemics, including three in Africa (Botswana, Namibia and Rwanda), have attained universal access to anti-retroviral therapy, spurring new hope across the world.

Southern Africa and Central Africa remain the regions most severely affected by HIV/Aids, with nearly one in 10 adults living with HIV. While the magnitude of the disease remains critical, policy interventions are having a positive impact.

New data confirms Africa’s drop in adult prevalence, from 5.9 per cent in 2001 to 4.9 per cent in 2011, driven partly by a steep decline in new HIV infections in 23 countries.

Africa has seen substantial progress in reducing prevalence, incidence and death associated with malaria and, to a lesser degree, tuberculosis (TB).

International funding for malaria control is on the rise, enabling endemic countries to increase access to insecticide-treated bed nets, rapid diagnostic tests and artemisinin-based combination therapy.

But Africa’s malaria burden is still enormous. Indeed, the continent accounted for about 81 per cent of the estimated 216 million malaria episodes in 2010 and about 91 per cent of the 655,000 malaria deaths.

“Enhanced efforts are thus necessary to properly prevent, diagnose and treat malaria in order to reverse the incidence of the disease,” the report says. 

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Africa, the report says, is making progress on Goal 7 of ensuring environmental sustainability, but achieving environmental sustainability remains a challenge overall.

Africa contribution to carbon emissions and ozone-depleting substances remains marginal but forest cover is contracting, and unless water and sanitation interventions are intensified in coming years, the continent might not meet these targets.

Data from several African countries suggests that the proportion of land area covered by forests is declining, with deforestation occurring at an alarming rate.  

African countries need to develop, improve and implement sustainable forestry policies with accompanying effective monitoring systems, the report adds.  

The report notes that safe drinking water interventions need to focus on rural population, which are holding back progress. The same applies for sanitation interventions, which require the efforts of all concerned to ensure adequate coverage.  

Lena Giesbert of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies based in Germany says the progress achieved so far on MDGs is an indication that Africa has worked its way up to the leading pack.

“On a global scale, the continent was in a rather weak state when the MDGs were agreed on. That’s why recent progress is surprising in a positive way,” Ms Giesbert said.

“Some of the goals go hand in hand — for instance, empowering women can also be achieved by educating girls and this Africa has just started.”

In terms of post-2015 development goals, she says Africa needs to continue to tackle different forms of inequality: Income inequality, gender inequality, and the inequality between rural and urban centres.

On global partnership for development, aid on trade commitments and disbursements to Africa have risen over the past few years.