Sub-regional Workshop on Aligning Development Policies and Strategies to Achieve MDGs in South Asia

A three-day sub regional workshop on Aligning Policies and Strategies to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in South Asia was held in Kathmandu, Nepal from 4 to 6 November 2009. This was the first event in the series of sub-regional level capacity building activities initiated by ADBI in partnership with Asian Development Bank (ADB), United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to assist developing countries in South Asia to achieve the MDGs by 2015.

Representatives from government, mostly senior officials who were directly in charge of each MDGs related sector in health, food & nutrition, water & sanitation, and overall MDG coordination from SAARC countries as well as representatives from NGOs, participated in the workshop.

The workshop was organized in cooperation with Government of Nepal (GON), South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Secretariat, World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS).

The program consisted of a series of thematic sessions (i) plenary session - providing overview of the current MDGs achievements and the key areas of concerns, (ii) round table session - showcasing experiences focusing on the approaches and implementation frameworks, (iii) group session - aiming to devise implementation frameworks in each of key sectors in health, water and sanitation and nutrition and (iv) panel discussions - promoting the common understanding on impediment and priority measures and highlighting credible development strategies & leadership qualities.

With the 2015 target date approaching, it is important to understand whether the goals are on track, and where additional efforts are needed. There are significant improvements in narrowing gender disparities, arresting HIV and AIDS and tuberculosis spread, strengthening environment protection in most countries of the region. Slow progress in child/infant mortality and maternal care, the inequities in improvement between the poor and rich, urban and rural residents, were reported. The low public health expenditures, high out of pocket expenditure, poor state of infrastructure, and lack of well-trained human resources were mentioned as related factors. As a way forward, the main recommendation emerged from workshop were (i) to increase public investment on health against government spending, (ii) to reduce out-of-pocket expenditure on health care and move towards universal health-care coverage, (iii) to ensure financial protection of the poor and excluded to accommodate inequities.

The countries in the region face two major challenges for achieving the drinking water and sanitation target; a rapid pace of urbanization, which requires an further effort even to keep up the current coverage levels; a huge backlog of rural people without basic sanitation and safe drinking water. Meanwhile the benefits and the costs of increasing access to improved water and sanitation vary considerably depending on the type of technology selected. The sound economic evaluation of the various options available in different settings, and benefit analysis including benefit to other social factors such as health and education were crucial to help rational decision-making for resource allocation.

The countries in the region faces great challenges in addressing the issues related to nutrition. About 79 million accounting for about half of the world's underweight children and over 350 million of world's hungry live in the region. In addition to the slow progress, the volatility of food prices seen at the recent food crisis and vulnerability of agriculture toward climate changes give added challenges not only for achieving MDGs but also sustaining food security of the regions. In fact, recently the number of undernourished people increased in South Asia by 2.1%. Meanwhile there is the fact that the large proportion of people suffering from extreme poverty and hunger reside in rural area and most of them involve in agriculture.

Even though structural transformations are necessary in the longer term, more immediate gains in poor households can be achieved through agriculture, which can help the poor overcome some of the critical constraints of their basic needs. In this context, the main recommendations raised in the workshop were (i) to increase both financial and human resource allocation to agriculture sector, (ii) to improve the accessibility to farm inputs, research, extension services aiming to improve capacity of medium to small farmers, (iii) to strengthen direct market linkages for farm products and improve value addition, (iv) to strengthen the coordination and monitoring systems, (v) to extend price intervention / expand agriculture insurance to support minimum price for potential growth.