[Sri Lanka] unlikely to reduce poverty by half by 2015

from The Asian Tribune

By Munza Mushtaq – Reporting from Colombo for Asian Tribune

Colombo, 06 July, (Asiantribune.com): The World Bank Country Director for Sri Lanka Peter Harrold has declared that it is unlikely that Sri Lanka will achieve the Millennium Development Goal [MDG] of reducing poverty by half by the year 2015.

"The two targets, poverty and malnutrition are closely linked, one represents income poverty and the second represents non-income poverty. We need to understand why Sri Lanka is lagging behind on these targets and address the issues immediately for one impacts on the other in significant ways," he said.

Nearly 29% of Sri Lankan children underweight, and about 30% of women and children under five anemic, Sri Lanka faces serious consequences for human capital development.

These revelations were made when representatives of the Sri Lankan Government, World Bank and a number of key development partners convened to launch a program to critically analyze the issue of malnutrition in the country.

"Sri Lanka can boast of better health indicators than most countries with comparable per capita incomes. However, despite investing much on nutrition programs over the years, surprisingly Sri Lanka has not performed well in reducing malnutrition," the World Bank said. .

The better health indicators for Sri Lanka are low infant and maternal mortality rate, and high life expectancy, which are the lowest among countries in the South Asia Region. Yet, Sri Lanka also has the highest child underweight rate among the few countries with a similar per capita income. The malnutrition rate is three times as high as you would expect from a country with Sri Lanka's infant mortality. Thus the country has done well to ensure a healthy birth but needs to do more to make sure children stay healthy the first few years.

It was also noted that although severe malnutrition is relatively low in Sri Lanka and child under nutrition has decreased from 38 percent in 1987 to 29 percent in 2000. However, this still leaves one in three children underweight. There are also great disparities in child malnutrition across sectors, socioeconomic strata and education levels with highest rates found among the poor and in the poorest provinces such as Uva and in the estate sector.

A recently published World Bank report, Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development, says that malnutrition has long been known to undermine economic growth and perpetuate poverty, and yet, over previous decades, the international community and most governments in developing countries have failed to tackle malnutrition, even though well-tested approaches for doing so exist.

"Intuitively, we all think that putting more food in the mouths of school children will improve nutrition, and yet, as this report shows us, there is actually a very small "window of opportunity" to improve nutrition, between pre-pregnancy and the first two years of age," says Meera Shekar, a Senior Nutrition Specialist in the World Bank's Human Development Network, and lead author of the new report. The damage that happens during this period is irreparable. If we miss this window, we have missed the opportunity to address an entire generation of children, she cautioned.

- Asian Tribune -