The United Nations is reporting that Latin America and the Caribbean achieved the target of halving extreme poverty, one of the 2015 UN Development Goals, with the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day falling from 13 per cent in 1990 to four per cent in 2015.
According to the just released Millennium Development Goals Report 2015, the proportion of undernourisshed people in the totla population of Latin America and the Caribbean has decreased from 15 per cent in 1990-1992 to six per cent in 2014-2016.
In an importation distinction, however, the report reveals that while in 2014-2016 the prevalence of undernourishment in Latin America was less than five per cent, it was at 20 per cent in the Caribbean.
In the area of primary education, the report shows that the adjusted net enrolment rate grew from 87 per cent in 1990 to 94 per cent in 2015, "but most of the progress was made before 2000."
Disparaties in primary education remain large among the two sub-regions, the UN report reveals, with 82 per cent net enrolment in the Caribbean and 95 per cent in Latin America.
Importantly, parity has been achieved in primary education between boys and girls in the region. Women in Latin America and the Caribbean participate in paid employment nearly as much as men, with 45 out of every 100 wage-earning jobs in the non-agricultural sector being held by women, "the highest in all developing regions."
Women's representation in parliaments (27% in 2015) is the highest among all develping regions, "and even higher than the average share in developed regions."
The report is based on a master set of data, compiled by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on MDG Indicators, led by the Department of Economics and Social Affairs of the UN Secretariat. This was in response to the wishes of the General Assembly for periodic assessment of progress towards the MDGs.
Most successful
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in the foreword to the full report, covering all development regions, has declared that the global mobilization behind the Millennium Development Goals "has produced the most successful anti-poverty movement in history."
He says the MDG helped to lift more than one billion people out of extreme poverty, "to make inroads against hunger, to enable more girls to attend school than ever before to protect our planet."
Nevetheless, the UN Secretary-General has conceded, that, "for all the remarkable gains... inequalities persist and... progress has been uneven."
According to Ban Ki-moon, the world's poor "remain overwhelmingly concentrated in some parts of the world," with nearly 60 per cent of the world's one billion extremely poor people living in just five countries.
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