BACKGROUNDER 3 - SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT POLICIES AND PROGRESS

To achieve those ends, the ESCAP countries and areas set themselves specific social objectives. These goals, taken from existing international treaties, declarations and commitments, were assembled in a document called the Agenda for Action on Social Development in the ESCAP Region. This Regional Social Development Agenda sprawls over some 40 pages, addressing issues as disparate as social harmony and shelter, employment and the environment, good governance and adequate education.

The most ambitious and important of the Regional Social Development Agenda’s targets is the eradication of absolute poverty from the Asia and Pacific region by 2010. Governments made the immediate promise to identify who among their peoples were the poorest and the neediest.

But governments also recognized that poverty was both a cause and effect – of unemployment, illiteracy, poor nutrition, obstacles to access to productive resources, discrimination, and a host of other social and economic injustices. Thus the elimination of poverty would be impossible without addressing these other challenges. So economies promised themselves that, by 2000:

• More mothers in the region would survive childbirth as did in 1990,
• Half as many people would be illiterate as in 1990,
• More children would survive after the age of five as did in 1990,
• Four in five children in the region would complete primary school,
• The exploitation of children as labourers would be made illegal,
• Appropriate modes of land reform in urban and rural areas would be determined,
• Comprehensive national disaster preparedness and management plans would be in place throughout the region, and
• All Asian and Pacific peoples would have full access to primary health care, basic education, safe drinking water and sanitary human waste disposal.

The end of the decade, however, does not mean the end of the Regional Social Development Agenda. Governments set themselves successive targets for years after 2000. For example, they also pledged that:

• By 2005, girls in the region would be able to participate on an equal basis in primary and secondary education,
• By 2010, wage differences between women and men working the same job would be eradicated, when and where they exist,
• By 2015, children born in the region would have a life expectancy at birth of greater than 75 years, and
• By 2025, all settlements in the region would have their own energy supply, sewerage and solid waste disposal.

Despite its multiplicity of goals, targets, actions and strategies, the Regional Social Development Agenda has but one aim: to make the region a place renowned for both human and economic progress.

Next: The actions

Back to the overview page of the Ministerial Conference

Home | Site Map | Feedback | UN Home Page | ESCAP Home Page
© 1997-1998 United Nations ESCAP - All rights reserved. Last update 16 December 1997