September 02, 2005, 18:30
Despite concerns from non-governmental organisations, government is positive that it is well on its way to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. These goals aiming to reduce poverty will come under review this month at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The Millennium Development Goal countries agree that economic development will be difficult with an unhealthy population. They have made some developmental progress, but more needs to be done. Five years ago just over 11% of people were surviving on less than a dollar a day, the aim is to reduce this to under 6% by 2015.
Primary school enrolment is now 4% short of the UN's goal and infant and child mortality must both be reduced to under 2% by 2015. South Africa has put close to 50 000 HIV/Aids patients on ARV treatment, but TB deaths have risen substantially.
Roleplayers however are concerned about the accuracy of official statistics. "What is important is that we don't throw away one answer because of another. The best thing is to look at those answers critically and decide which are the most useful and probably try and triangular the data. In other words you end up with an estimate that is between those estimates," said Prof. John Seager of the Human Sciences Research Council.
Hassen Lorgat from South African National NGO Coalition said: "We know once we have great policies, implementation is very sketchy. W'ere not saying we're off the rails, but clearly there's a lot to work on. Hospitals lack very basic resources." Government admits its needs to work on delivering quality data, but says its made some headway. It also wants more emphasis on provincial progress.
Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the health minister. said: "At least now we have some kind of a base line having had a census not so long ago which then assists us to at least have a denominator around which we operate, because before we didn't."
There is concern that the foreigners who set African targets often do not understand the continent's problems and this often results in unrealistic targets especially for poor countries.
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