Malaysia: The Millennium Development Goals at Launch by Yang Berhormat Dato' S.K. Devamany,

Transcription

1 Please check against delivery Malaysia: The Millennium Development Goals at 2010 Launch by Yang Berhormat Dato' S.K. Devamany, Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister s Department, Malaysia Opening Address by Mr. Kamal Malhotra United Nations Resident Coordinator, Malaysia 28 April 2011, Putrajaya

2 Yang Berhormat Dato' S.K. Devamany, Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister s Department, Malaysia Yang Berbahagia Dato Noriyah Ahmad, Director General of the Economic Planning Unit, Prime Minister s Department Excellencies, Ambassadors and High Commissioners, members of the Diplomatic Corps Tan Sri Tan Sri, Puan Sri Puan Sri, Datuk-Datuk, Datin-Datin Members of the UN Country Team Distinguished Guests, Members of the Media A very good morning to you all. On behalf of the United Nations Country Team in Malaysia, it is my great pleasure and privilege to welcome all of you to the launch of the report, Malaysia: The Millennium Development Goals at 2010 by Yang Berhormat Dato S.K. Devamany, Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister s Department. I would like to thank the Minister and him for his support and to Dato Devamany for agreeing to launch the report. On behalf of the UN Country Team in Malaysia, I would also like to take this opportunity to thank especially Yang Berbahagia Dato Noriyah Ahmad, Director General of the Economic Planning Unit, and Dato Mat Noor, Deputy Director-General I of the Economic Planning Unit both for their commitment and their support for the preparation of this report. I would also like to thank the Economic Planning Unit s Technical Team, all our consultants, especially the Team Leader Mr Khoo Khay Jin, members of the Steering Committee, members of the United Nations Country Team in Malaysia and the Resident Coordinator s Unit, especially Dr Lin Mui Kiang as well as other UN staff who worked on this report as well as others who

3 contributed to it, including Civil Society Organizations. And I would like to thank each and everyone of you for taking time from your busy schedules to join us at the launch of this flagship document. Distinguished guests, At the start of the new millennium in 2000, 189 world leaders came together at the United Nations in New York in an attempt to agree on ways to ensure a better future for everyone on our planet. The Summit resulted in the UN Millennium Declaration that enshrines consensual norms, values and principles on human rights, equality and democracy agreed by the world s political leaders for the very first time. It also provided the impetus for the UN, World Bank and experts from other organizations to translate the principles and values of the Declaration into the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These comprise eight global time-bound development goals, with targets, to be achieved by 2015, using a base year of 1990 to measure progress against. In the decade since, the MDGs have become a guiding force for action in many developing countries. At the September 2010 MDG Summit in New York, more than 140 Heads of State and world leaders agreed that impressive progress has been made, even though this has been uneven and slow in certain areas. The challenge now is to galvanize the necessary political commitment, resources and implementation action to achieve the goals in the next five years. As the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Yang Amat Berhormat Dato Sri Najib Tun Abdul Razak, in his Foreword to this report correctly points out, the MDG Report constitutes a report card for the international community on where countries stand in these areas. We are now more than two-thirds of the

4 way to Malaysia has made significant progress towards achieving most of the goals at the aggregate level. Ladies and Gentlemen, The distinctiveness of this 2010 review, however, is that, in addition to assessing national progress at the aggregate level, it adopts a disaggregated view of MDG progress and achievement, wherever feasible. It looks at performance at sub-national levels, by state, rural and urban strata, gender, ethnicity, age group, income group, and other relevant disaggregated categories. It seeks to identify regions and sub-national population groups which have been left behind or left out, other significant gaps and disparities, as well as emerging issues that have become important as a consequence of Malaysia s chosen development path. This is in keeping with the spirit and intent of the MDGs to promote equitable and inclusive development, and to localise the goals, making them relevant to country-specific realities, circumstances and aspirations. This exercise should help focus future attention on what needs urgent implementation action in the context of Malaysia s recently announced New Economic Model, Government Transformation Programme, Economic Transformation Programme Plan, and the 10th Malaysia Plan, all of which seek to help the country achieve its Vision As already indicated, this report reflects Malaysia s success in achieving many, even if not all the MDGs. While it confirms the 2005 MDG Report s overall findings that Malaysia s achievements are impressive in aggregate terms, there are some persistent areas of concern even at the aggregate level and new issues have emerged which are now urgent in view of Malaysia s ambitions to promote inclusive development and become a

5 high-income, developed nation by The MDGs on which Malaysia needs to make accelerated national level progress at this stage include maternal mortality, universal access to reproductive health, the share of women in managerial positions and political representation, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. Ladies and Gentlemen, Let me now briefly review Malaysia s record on each of the eight MDGs, including at a disaggregated level and identify what the UN in Malaysia is doing or can do to help. While Malaysia has achieved the aggregate MDG 1 objective of halving poverty, rural Sabah is not on track to achieve this MDG by 2015 with poverty levels that are still in excess of 30 % of the population in Also, income inequality has remained high and stubborn in Malaysia as a whole over the last twenty years. It is therefore time for Malaysia to prioritize relative poverty as a major policy axis in order to ensure that it safeguards the welfare and well-being of marginalized groups and to address its relatively high level of inequality. While the prioritization of the bottom 40% in the 10 th Malaysia Plan should be welcomed, specific polices will need to be designed and effectively implemented for different sub-groups because different strata in the bottom 40 per cent will require different approaches best suited to their needs. UNDP is currently working with EPU to address this challenge. For MDG 2, school attendance is used by Malaysia as a proxy for the literacy rate. This has risen steeply over time and is currently over 95 per cent for both boys and girls which is a noteworthy achievement. Many experts, however, question whether this is an accurate proxy for literacy. Moreover, some indigenous minority groups continue to be left behind even by this

6 measure. Nevertheless, the principal challenge now for Malaysia at the primary and secondary school levels is not the quantity measure but the quality of education, especially given the country s aspirations to become a high-income country by UNICEF can help in this regard. Under MDG3, while Malaysia has done well on access to education for women at all, including tertiary level, and met the MDG targets in this respect, women s participation in the labour force has stagnated over the past twenty five years at around 46% and this will need to significantly increase if Malaysia is to benefit both economically and in other ways. UNDP will be supporting the government in this area. Women also remain very under-represented in the Parliament and in State Assemblies as well as in managerial and executive positions despite outnumbering men 3:2 in tertiary education enrolment. Action should also be taken to remove the remaining reservations on the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The UN Country Team Theme Group on Gender has prioritized this area. The report also notes that further progress on the child mortality-related MDG 4 will be difficult as many of the underlying issues identified are in the nature of last mile issues and required more finely tuned approaches and instruments. UNICEF, nevertheless, will continue to provide support, as requested. Of more concern, the maternal mortality ratio (MMR), the main indicator under MDG 5, has plateaued at around 28 per 100,000 live births for the past decade. Although low by developing country standards, it is still relatively high compared with developed countries where the MMR is around 6 per 100,000 births. Recognizing that it is unlikely that Malaysia will meet

7 its MDG target of 11 per 100,000 live births by 2015, the Ministry of Health has set a target of 20 per 100,000 live births by Another MDG 5 target is universal access to contraception. Malaysia s contraceptive prevalence rate has stagnated at around 50% for over 25 years now, while its unmet needs for family planning remain high and are increasing, resulting in unplanned pregnancies and unwanted births, especially for women with less education. This is another area in which Malaysia will, on current trends, not be able to meet the MDG goals by Both WHO and UNFPA will continue to prioritize support in these two interrelated areas. Ladies and Gentlemen, For MDG 6, based on notifications and screenings, the spread of HIV has been halted and has begun to plateau for intravenous drug users. However, Malaysia s HIV/AIDS epidemic is found to have spread to other most at-risk populations groups such as female sex workers, transgenders and men having sex with men (MSM). Therefore, though Malaysia is progressively moving towards achieving MDG 6, it is unclear whether this goal can be achieved by The UN Country Team Theme Group on HIV and AIDS provides significant support on these challenging issues. The notification rate for tuberculosis (TB) has remained unchanged from However, new cases have grown by 80 per cent and the number of deaths have increased by 2.5 times. The management and control of TB has to be better coordinated with broader social and economic programmes which seek to reduce poverty, address the vulnerability of migrants, and reduce the gap between the availability of health care services and those in need. The WHO has expertise in this area.

8 Ladies and Gentlemen, For MDG 7, much of the enabling policy framework is in place to ensure environmental sustainability. However, commitments to the global community as well as to itself, as attested by the various Malaysia Plans, by legislation and policies such as for environmental and resource management, green energy, physical planning, and climate change need to be much more actively and urgently followed up to ensure much better implementation, coordination, monitoring and evaluation. Malaysia should also prioritize the development of appropriate incentives for states and the private sector to actually implement and comply with national policies and objectives. UNDP has prioritized support to Malaysia in most, if not all these inter-related areas. The aggregate MDG target of halving the proportion of people without access to safe water and improved sanitation has been achieved. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of the population in the states of Kelantan, Terengganu, Sabah and Sarawak continue to be without access to either or both. Action needs to be taken by the concerned authorities to address their needs. In terms of MDG 8, the extension of basic telecommunications infrastructure to rural areas in Sabah and Sarawak remains unsatisfactory, contributing to the significant digital divide between urban and rural areas and between high and low income population groups. And finally, also on MDG 8, in forging a Global Partnership for Development, Malaysia has moved from a net recipient of official development assistance (ODA), to becoming a development partner of other developing countries primarily through the Malaysia Technical Cooperation Programme (MTCP). While this should be welcomed, Malaysia s national interests and foreign policy objectives would benefit from a more strategic

9 approach to South-South cooperation which will allow Malaysia to punch above its weight in the changing global architecture of the international system and regain some of the leadership which it exercised in this area in the 1980s and event 1990s. UNDP has prioritized this as one of its core areas of support while other UN agencies are also ready to support South-South Cooperation in their respective areas of mandate. Ladies and Gentlemen, On behalf of the United Nations, I would like to congratulate Malaysia on its impressive overall progress thus far. Nevertheless, it now faces the dual challenge of achieving all the MDGs at the aggregate level as soon as possible and simultaneously focusing action on the identified areas of priority at a disaggregated level if it is to realize its ambition of becoming a developed nation by I would like to encourage policy makers and the Malaysian people to turn their attention, urgently, to cover the remaining distance by addressing the outstanding issues and challenges which have been highlighted in this Report. I hope that this report will be a source of inspiration as well as provide the practical guidance needed for Malaysia to meet its remaining developmental challenges and attain both full MDG achievement as soon as possible and Vision I thank you.