Assessing Progress in Africa towards the Millennium Development Goals

This Report presents a picture that is slightly at variance with many other reports on Africa’s progress towards the targets of the MDGs. It shows that progress is being made in a number of areas such as primary enrolment, gender parity in primary education, malaria deaths, and representation of women in parliaments. If this rate of progress continues, the continent will be on course to meet a significant number of the MDGs by the target date. This will still be disappointing since the objective is to reach all the targets by 2015. Furthermore, the report shows that a critical area for progress is the health-related MDGs where progress is slowest. Interventions to accelerate progress on the health MDGs will yield significant dividend. In sum, the preconditions for accelerating progress to meet the targets of the MDGs are now largely in place, albeit constrained by inadequate resource flows and capacity in some critical areas like health capacity. http://www.uneca.org/eca_programmes/acgd/docs/Assessing%20MDGs_Report%202008.pdf