How Realistic Are the Millennium Development Goals in the Case of Haiti?
Summary: A June 2009 paper by Dagobert Élisée and Schmied St Fleur of the ONPES sounding out whether Haiti's Millennium Development Goals were attainable, nationally and by department. Working from EMMUS IV data, it builds an optimistic scenario premised on coherent public policy and a darker one premised on inaction.
Key Findings
- The paper's own verdict is mixed by goal rather than uniformly pessimistic. Child malnutrition is judged very unlikely to reach the MDG 1 target, while parity in primary education and under-five mortality under MDG 3 and MDG 4 are judged probable. That split, not an overall pass or fail, is the paper's contribution.
- Extreme poverty is projected to stay above half the population on both scenarios: 55 percent in 2015 under the optimistic scenario built on coherent public policy, and 60 to 65 percent under the scenario of inaction. The optimistic case is therefore still a majority-poor country.
- The environment goal is the one the paper treats as clearly out of reach, on both forest cover and access to drinking water, which it flags as a dark outlook regardless of scenario.
- The starting point is measured with unusual candor. Life expectancy at birth is 54 years; the average calorie ration, estimated at 1,788 calories a day per person in 1987, or 80 percent of the FAO recommendation, had fallen to about 1,750 by the second half of the 1990s. The paper quotes the World Bank to the effect that 80 percent of the two thirds of the population living in rural areas are poor.
- The composite indices place Haiti in a critical position: an HDI of 0.534, decomposed into 0.575 for longevity, 0.542 for education and 0.469 for standard of living, against a human poverty index of 58.5, with GDP per capita at 560 dollars and an economic dependency ratio of 69.7 percent per 100 inhabitants in 2008.
- Water and sanitation are worse in the countryside by a wide margin: 58 percent of the population has access to an improved water source nationally, 51 percent rural against 70 percent urban, while improved sanitation reaches 19 percent nationally in 2006, 12 percent rural against 29 percent urban.
- The choice to cover only education, health and drinking water is justified by the structure of the goals themselves. Those three sectors hold 6 of the 8 goals, and counting all environment-related indicators they account for 53 percent of the 17 targets and 54 percent of the 48 indicators.
- Community priorities from a poverty-perception survey do not rank income first but come close to it: youth employment 17.5 percent, drinking water 15.7 percent, school construction 13.7 percent and health center construction 13.3 percent, which places two of the paper's three chosen sectors in the top four community demands.
- Departmental disaggregation shows the national average hiding the extremes. For underweight children, against a 2015 national target of 13.4 percent, Artibonite's dark scenario is above 40 percent and its optimistic scenario a range of 18 to 40 percent, while Nord-Est and Sud-Est start from a less alarming position.
- Two cautions for anyone reusing the numbers. The departmental and scenario tables do not survive text extraction cleanly, and several health indicators appear in the extracted text with inconsistent units, including a tuberculosis incidence written as 147.8 percent where the indicator is per 100,000 inhabitants. Read the tables in the PDF.
Full Description
The ONPES is the national poverty and social exclusion observatory, and this is one of the few of its papers the corpus holds. The indicators chosen cover education, health and a third fundamental sector, and the departmental breakdown is the useful part: it shows which departments the national averages were concealing. Read with the IHSI's December 2009 MDG review, which is the statistical counterpart.
How to cite
Observatoire National de la Pauvreté et de l'Exclusion Sociale (ONPES); Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation (MPCE), 2009, How Realistic Are the Millennium Development Goals in the Case of Haiti?, https://www.undp.org/fr/haiti/publications/onpes-2009-degre-realisme-omd