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More aid needed for Asia says UN commission as report shows region is overlooked

More aid needed for Asia says UN commission as report shows region is overlooked

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Amid findings released today showing that aid donors are overlooking Asia in favour of Africa, the head of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) told high-level delegates at a London conference that the region should get “a better deal.”

Amid findings released today showing that aid donors are overlooking Asia in favour of Africa, the head of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) told high-level delegates at a London conference that the region should get “a better deal.”

The findings, supported by funding from the Asian Development Bank are contained in a report entitled “Achieving the MDGs in Asia: a Case for More Aid?” which shows that Asia has received far less aid than other regions of the world in comparison to the size of the population, the level of income and the number of poor it hosts.

UNESCAP Executive Secretary Mr Kim Hak-Su delivered the key findings of the report at the two-day “Asia 2015 Conference Promoting Growth, Ending Poverty.” The report found Asia accounts for the lion’s share of people lacking access to sanitation, underweight children, malnourished people, those living on less than a dollar a day, and tuberculosis (TB) cases in the world.

It also found that three quarters of all Asians in rural areas lacking access to sanitation live in China and India.

In absolute terms, India is home to 38 per cent of the world total of underweight children below the age of five, more than one and a half times the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. India also has more than double the amount of illiterate 15 to 24 year old women than in any other sub-region of the world, including sub Saharan Africa.

“The number of people in Asia living with HIV/AIDS – 7.6 million between the ages 15 and 49, of which 5.1 million in India alone, compared to 23.8 million in Sub-Saharan Africa – is, however, far from insignificant. HIV/AIDS is also rapidly spreading in some parts of Asia, in particular the CIS countries and India. Asia as a whole accounts for more than two thirds of the world’s TB cases and deaths,” the report states.

The report analyzes aid to sub-regions in the world on a needs basis calculated on percentage share of underweight children and other Millennium Development Goal indicators, finding that Asia is being ignored in favour of Africa. It says most sub-regions in Asia are receiving relatively “small shares of the global aid total” and

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of targets set by the UN Millennium Summit in 2000 which seek to deal with a host of socio-economic ills such as extreme poverty and hunger, maternal and infant mortality and lack of access to education and health care, all by 2015.