This article has been excerpted from the Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS) on March 3, 2010. To read the full piece, please click here.
GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 3, 2010 (IPS) – Guatemala knows that when it comes time to demonstrate compliance with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of global anti-poverty and development target to be met by 2015, it will make a poor showing.
Along with the rest of the world’s governments, authorities in this impoverished Central American nation committed themselves at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000 to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, from 1990 levels.
In 1989, 20 percent of the Guatemalan population was living in extreme poverty. At the start of this century, the MDG poverty goal appeared to be within reach, because by 2000 absolute poverty had been reduced to 16 percent of the population, which currently stands at 13 million people.
But by 2004, the extreme poverty rate had risen again, to an even higher level than in 1989: 21.5 percent, according to the Secretariat of Planning and Programming’s latest report on progress towards the MDGs, drawn up in 2006.
And things have only gotten worse since then, with the knock-on effects of the global economic crisis that originated in the United States in 2008.
A 2009 report by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) reported the drop in remittances sent home by migrant workers abroad and the rise in unemployment and of Guatemalans deported from the United States, among the impacts of the crisis in this country.
To read the rest of this article, please follow this link.
To read other education articles on Clinic Link, click here.
Comments are closed.