BREAKING NEWS, Business
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THERE was no forward or backward shift from the 2014 Nigeria’s 152nd position in the 2016 report of the African Human Development Index, HDI, released by the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP on Sunday in Nairobi, Kenya. Nigeria’s HDI value for 2014, according to UNDP’s 2015 report was 0.514 which put the country in the low human development category, positioning it at 152 out of 188 countries and territories.
But between 2005 and 2014, Nigeria’s HDI value increased from 0.467 to 0.514, an increase of 10.1 percent or an average annual increase of about 1.07 percent. Similarly, in the latest ranking, values and trends, Nigeria was still placed on Low Human Development, LHD, category outside High Human Development, HHD, Medium Human Development, MHD which featured 53 countries in Africa.
On the HHD table, Mauritius was place at the highest 63 position while Tunisia came last at 96 position on the Group average rating. Botswana opened the table of MHD with 106 position while São Tomé and Príncipe came last at 143 position.
Kenya, the host country of the Toyoko International Conference on African Development, TICAD, where UNDP announced the report in a press conference, was placed at 145 position on the list of countries ranked low with Niger Republic taking the last position at 188. Kenya’s average annual HDI between 2010 and 2014 was 0.92 percent, outperforming Nigeria whose annual HDI within the same period was placed at 1.06.
The HDI is a summary measure for assessing long-term progress in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and health life, access to knowledge and a decent standard of living. Meanwhile, the UNDP has stated that sub-Saharan Africa was losing the average of $95 billion a year due to gender inequality. It said that the situation escalated in 2014 when the region lost $105 billion or six percent of the region’s GDP.
A report of the World Body titled “Africa Human Development Report 2016: Advancing Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Africa, published on Sunday stated that the unhealthy development was jeopardising the continent’s efforts for inclusive human development and economic growth “If gender gaps can be closed in labour markets, education, health, and other areas, then poverty and hunger eradication can be accelerated”, said.
UNDP Administrator Helen Clark at the launch of the 2016 African Human Development report attended by Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta during the TICAD VI event. Achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment is the right thing to do, and is a development imperative”, Clark added.
The UNDP report analyses the political, economic and social drivers that hamper African women’s advancement and proposes policies and concrete actions to close the gender gap. These included addressing the contradiction between legal provisions and practice in gender laws; breaking down harmful social norms and transforming discriminatory institutional settings; and securing women’s economic, social and political participation.
Giving reasons for the discrimination, the UNDP report stated that unequal distribution of power, wealth amongst others limit the women from realising their full potentials. “Deeply-rooted structural obstacles such as unequal distribution of resources, power and wealth, combined with social institutions and norms that sustain inequality are holding African women, and the rest of the continent, back”, it stated.
The report also estimated “that a 1 percent increase in gender inequality reduces a country’s human development index by 0.75 percent.” – Vanguard
— Aug 29, 2016 @ 14:58 GMT
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