Global Development Decline Offers Opportunities for Improvement
Global Development Decline Offers Opportunities for Improvement. WHILE RECENT international reports indicate an unprecedented decline in global development amid the coronavirus pandemic, experts say there are steps that can be taken in the fields of health and education to help developing countries bounce back.
A report released in May by the United Nations Development Programme predicted that global human development – a combination of the world’s education, health and living standards, according to an announcement news release – is on pace this year to decline for the first time in 30 years. A more recent report released Monday by the World Bank had a similarly dire outlook – the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to plunge most countries into a recession in 2020. Developing economies are forecast to contract by 2.5%, while more advanced economies are projected to contract by 7%.
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“This is going to be the worst year for developing countries that they’ve had in three generations,” says Masood Ahmed, the president of the Center for Global Development, a research-focused think tank that works to reduce global poverty and inequality. Global Development Decline Offers Opportunities for Improvement.
But out of this crisis comes both near- and long-term opportunities for improvement in the education, health and technology sectors, experts say. Ahmed recommends that with so many students out of school as well as the gaps in distance learning capabilities, standardized tests should be phased out for the next year because they might “exacerbate the inequalities” that already exist.
But Vegas worries that, with so many countries facing budget shortfalls due to the pandemic, education will see cuts “because people perceive the benefits of education to be so far in the future.”
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“Education should be, not only part of the investment for the future, but it’s really a solution to recovery,” she says. “And I think that’s important for developing countries in particular.” Global Development Decline Offers Opportunities for Improvement.
The technology and internet access gap is real, however, and addressing it will require a “real commitment from the international community,” Vegas says. Closing the digital gap will cost around $100 billion, according to Heriberto Tapia, a policy specialist with the U.N. Development Programme.
That sort of commitment is “not a huge leap” because it is a small percentage of the packages that the United States and Europe are already providing, says Dr. Paul Spiegel, the director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University.
Ahmed also says there should be a focus on improving connections between governments and people in developing countries in order to deliver information and services more easily, especially in times of emergency. Global Development Decline Offers Opportunities for Improvement.
Because developing countries are generally densely populated and don’t have the fallback of good health systems, changing health behaviors will be important, says Steven Radelet, the director of the Global Human Development Program at Georgetown University. This type of behavioral and hygiene change can happen, he says, noting his experience in Liberia during the Ebola crisis.
“It was remarkable to me how quickly people were willing to change their behaviors once the message got out, partly from government leaders, but actually what mattered most was community and church leaders,” he says.
Spiegel agrees on the importance of working with communities. But he cautions that because of the focus on the pandemic and people being urged to stay home unless they have a serious ailment, we will see a lot of deaths due to non-COVID-19 cases. He points out that during the Ebola crisis in West Africa, there were actually more deaths due to malaria than there were due to Ebola.
“We need to really be careful and follow up with health information systems,” Spiegel adds.
While there’s likely to be a “huge setback” in human development due to the pandemic over the next few years, Radelet says we shouldn’t lose sight of the “incredible progress” that’s been made globally in recent decades. He notes the child mortality rate in developing countries dropping from more than 20% to less than 5%, and the large decrease in the number of people in the world living below the global standard for extreme poverty – a decline from 2 billion to around 600 million in the span of 30 years.
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Request Now“Nothing like that has ever happened before in the history of the world,” Radelet says.
Tapia says getting out of this global crisis will require a coordinated effort.
“This is gonna be a big test for multilateralism and cooperation,” he says. “And it would be important that we do it in a way that also allows us to build some principles of a stronger collective action.”
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