• Cash till payday: Funds to sort out all your sudden monetary hassles
• Top Home Internet Business Ideas for You
• Payday Loan Works As Monetary Help on Time of Financial Crisis
• Move Over Tarp 1 Through Tarp 15 Bailout Financial Stimulus Rescue Plans, Burp and Burps are Here and Barfs is on Its Way From Palm Springs Attorney
• Smart Way to Make Money With your Best Home Based Business Idea
• Payday Loans No Paper Work-surmount the Cash Crisis With No Paper Work
• Forex News-Discover the Secrets
• Unsecured Loans for Unemployed – Get Rid Of Monetary Depression
• Financial Literacy 101
• Instant Payday Loans- Instant Solution for Your Entire Financial Crisis

Pakistan: Are Millennium Development Goals attainable by 2015?

Posted on July 31, 2010
Filed Under 1 |

Karachi: No woman should have to pay with her life for giving life, hoped United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a recent speech on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs, recognised in 2001 by the UN, aim to eradicate poverty in the developing world. The goals include promoting universal primary education, practicing gender equality, working for neonatal health and for improving the maternal mortality rate by providing skilled birth attendants. Many countries in the comity of nations pledged to achieve MGDs by 2015, and Pakistan, being one of the signatories, also vowed to alleviate poverty and to look after its children and women. In reality, maternal mortality is an issue that is often put on the back burner in Pakistan for various reasons.

Dr Shershah Syed, a senior gynecologist, maintained that the MDGs will not be achieved by 2015 given the prevalent governmental apathy. First and foremost, there is no effort from the government’s side to ensure that people do not die of preventable diseases,” Dr Syed said. “Secondly, one of the major points in the MDGs is to alleviate extreme poverty and hunger. In Pakistan, that has increased tenfold within the past few years,” the doctor told The News. Syed said that a number of his patients hailed from the poorest areas of the country, and did not have enough to even pay for their medicines. “If poverty is not taken care of, how can we expect mothers and children to survive?” he asked, adding that if the will of the state had been there, nothing was impossible.

Dr Syed’s views are bedded in hard facts. According to the Pakistan Demographic Health Survey 2006-07, the maternal mortality rate has reached 276 per 100,000 live births. Experts believe that the rate needs to be brought down to 140 per 100,000 live births. “I do realise that initiatives take time but the fact is that we have no initiatives on protecting mothers who die while giving birth.”

Giving some examples, Dr Syed said that some extremely underdeveloped countries had geared themselves to tackle health issues head on, and had shown tremendous progress despite many odds. “Bangladesh and Nepal have bounced back from the brink and have taken initiatives to save their mothers and children,” he explained. “Unfortunately, no such thing is happening in Pakistan.” He said that achieving the MDGs needed time and a will on part of the government to invest in the people, rather than on nuclear strategies and weapons. Dr Syed said that all the MDGs were dependant on one another and formed a link. If one of them was missing, the other could not be achieved.

On the other hand, consultant gynecologist, Dr Nighat Shah, believed that people needed a renewed sense of hope in times of confusion and uncertainty, and said that the MDGs were achievable. She said that though the health indicators were slow, yet they were steady. “Many things that were unimaginable earlier are happening now,” she said. “Be it the functioning of the rural health centres or the extensive participation of lady health workers in the field, all this has happened within the past few years,” she said.

Dr Shah said that it had been a collective responsibility of all the sectors in a state rather than the state alone. “I’m not shying away from the facts, but the point is that nothing is as bad as we make it out to be. It is true that we have problems, but it needs all of us to accept our responsibilities rather than point out a finger at others every time a thing goes wrong,” she said. Dr Shah said that the role of the people had always been crucial in such situations, as it involved not only the officials but the religious sections of our society as well. “I came to know about a gynecologist in Bangladesh who had asked the Ulema to talk during their sermons about the advantages of using contraception and family planning.” *

It was just a matter of taking problems as a community’s problem rather than leaving everyone to fend for themselves on their own, she added. “Our role as a gynecologist does not end with just delivering the baby. It starts from there,” she said. “We need not to give them immediate care only but also have to think what the patient will do 10 years down the road as well,” she said.

[*OPT emphasis added]

Source: http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=253663