Assessing The Achievement Of MDG's

Uganda is signatory to the Millennium Declaration - Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) that was launched at the UN summit in September 2000. The declaration set targets to be achieved by 2015 on eight key pillars which also strategically link with Uganda’s Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) a policy framework for achieving economic development.

From the 2007/8 status report, significant progress has been made in the areas of eradication of extreme poverty, Universal Primary education (UPE), Gender equity and HIV and AIDS. Uganda continues to enjoy persistent economic progress and low inflation in the last two review periods until recently when world over the food and fuel crisis coupled with political challenges in the neighbouring Kenya have hit hard the economy. The poverty head count has reduced in the last two household’s survey (2002/3-2006/7) by 8 percentage points from 39%-31%, in contrast however income inequality as measured by the gini-coefficient worsened over the years between 2000 -2005 from 0.39 to 0.41. Uganda however has the third highest population growth rate of 3.4% p.a. higher than Sub-Saharan Africa average of 2.4% p.a. and a high fertility rate of 7.8 (demographic and health survey 2006), this has greatly contributed to the increasing poverty levels in the country (in absolute terms) especially in the rural areas and a reduced GDP per capita.

In a recent survey on the health sector by Kabarole Research Centre a local NGO in western Uganda, accessibility to national health services in the Rwenzori region (covering districts of Kabarole, Kyenjojo, Kamwenge, Kasese and Bundibugyo) stood at 23% compared to the national average of 49%, only 42% of the visited health centres provided laboratory services and only 5/10 patients that visits the health centres obtain full treatment, 5/10 have to buy own medicine or visit traditional medicine facilities.

Looking at these statistics, one realises that there are still considerable challenges to be addressed if developing countries are to realistically attain their development goals, the civil society and the private sector have a big role to play in terms of providing strong base for grassroots advocacy and accountability, providing alternative pro-poor policy recommendations, and promoting community owned development initiatives. Uganda has put in place measures and institutional frameworks to improve on human development and reduce poverty, the formulation of the peace recovery and development plan (PRDP) and the prosperity for all (PRA) programs are some of the strategies that have been formulated to add impetus to the PEAP these are hoped to accelerate the process of poverty reduction to the national target of 10% by 2017.