Flirting with social development

Having miserably failed to achieve the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015), Pakistan made yet another commitment by signing up to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN General Assembly on September 25 of this year; the goals will become applicable in January 2016.

Pakistan has eagerly pledged to the SDGs. However, we seemed to have been little aware of the thought and processes that went into making these goals.Pakistan did not participate in most of the consultative meetings held to frame these goals and targets. The federal government did not even consult the provinces in whose domain a majority of the SDGs fall.

In 2000, Pakistan had also committed to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) but fell way short of achieving seven out of eight MDGs, far behind other regional countries in South Asia including Bangladesh and Nepal, which received international awards for best performances in meeting the targets. So comprehensive was our failure that we could not meet even a single education-related MDG targets.

In 2006, this scribe attended a consultative meeting on MDGs at the Civil Secretariat of Punjab in Lahore, where the then provincial finance secretary who later served as chief secretary of the province had claimed that we would go much beyond the MDGs.

The fact is that, at present, most of Pakistan’s human development indicators are similar to those of poor African countries and the country is fast heading towards the league of sub-Saharan African nations. For example, in the area of family planning we are among the world’s three worst-performing countries, alongside Uganda and Ghana.

Pakistan was supposed to cut maternal mortality and neonatal mortality rates by two-thirds of the baseline by 2015; that did not happen. One of the MDGs was to achieve a maternal mortality ratio (MMR) of 140 per 100,000 births while Pakistan sustains a high MMR of 276 per 100,000 live births during the last a decade, according to a report by Save the Children released this year. In Balochistan, this ratio is over 700 per 100,000 live births. The target of SDGs is that Pakistan will reduce maternal mortality to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030.

Tragically, our neonatal mortality ratio is stuck at 42 per 1000 new-borns for the past many years. The SDG is to bring this ratio to 12 per 1000 live births. The under-five mortality ratio in Pakistan is 104 per 1000 births for which the SDG target is 25 per 1000 live births.

The poor indicators of neonatal and maternal mortality ratio are understandable given low spending on health projects by the provincial governments. Not only do the provinces allocate a small portion of annual development budgets to education, water supply and sanitation and health, they actually spend much smaller amounts than the original allocations.

For example, during the last five fiscal years – 2010-2015 – the Punjab government in its annual budgets allocated an amount of Rs91 billion for development projects on health but actually spent only Rs50.6 billion as per official figures – 45 percent less than what was originally promised. More or less the same situation exists in other provinces where health is a neglected area.

The only MDG target where Pakistan fared better is of gender equality and women empowerment because of the larger women’s representation in the elected bodies as decreed by military ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf. The present Punjab government has reduced women’s seats in the local bodies from 33 percent to 23 percent.

This year when the Punjab government prepared a bill to increase the age of marriage from 16 years to 18 years through an amendment in the 1929 Child Marriage Act, the elected members of the Punjab Assembly from the province’s southern districts bitterly opposed the move, making the government backtrack. This legislation could be helpful in preventing young girls in the province being married off; early marriage is one of the reasons of the high maternal mortality ratio.

Our past track record demonstrates that we seldom fulfil our international commitments in the areas of social and human development though the country remains on the forefront of making such pledges. For instance, we were among 16 of 69 countries that made tall promises at the 2012’s Family Planning Conference (FP20-20) in London.

So far, little progress is visible on this count despite generous financial assistance provided by the international community including USAID and DFID. One of the targets was to achieve a contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) of 55 percent by 2020 but the rate has been stagnant in Pakistan at 34 percent for many years.

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the CPR stands at 29 percent, in Sindh at 30 percent and in Balochistan at 14 percent. There is not a single warehouse of modern contraceptives in the country; there is no mechanism in place for tracking progress on family planning.

Similarly, though committed to the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, Pakistan has not been able to bring its tobacco control laws and regulations in conformity with the treaty after 11 years of signing it, though it was among the first 40 signatories. This is despite the fact that the high prevalence of tobacco consumption in our country remains a leading cause of preventable death and diseases for our citizens; each year more than 110,000 Pakistanis die as a result of tobacco use (PDHS 2012-13).

The 18th Amendment proved to be a major setback to the social sector because most of these subjects have been devolved to the provinces. But the provinces have not taken up full responsibility for the devolved subjects over the last five years. No national or provincial policy exists on the crucial subjects of education, health, population, youth and tobacco control. Similarly, the provinces have neither adopted federal laws nor framed their own laws relating to these topics.

The provinces are either little aware of, or are consciously neglecting, their responsibilities in fulfilling international commitments. Since the majority of the SDGs fall in the purview the provinces, the federal and provincial governments need to coordinate on these issues to ensure policymaking and legislation, followed by financial resource allocation and development of implementation mechanisms.

A country that could not attain the somewhat modest targets of the Millennium Development Goals, mainly pertaining to education and health, has now committed to the much more ambitious SDGs which consist of 17 goals and 169 targets to be achieved over the next 15 years till the year 2030.

Our rulers have traditionally been eager to commit to international commitments such as MDGs – and now SDGs – mainly because such commitments bring them plenty of foreign funds which they can then use on their perks and privileges such as modern gadgets, new luxurious cars and palatial offices in the name of new projects.

Given the weak political will, and the poor capacity of our institutions, we can only hope that the SDGs do not meet the same fate as met by the MDGs.

Email: adnanadilzaidi@gmail.com