Human development faces first decline in decades.

Byline: Amin Ahmed

ISLAMABAD -- Global human development - which can be measured as a combination of the world's education, health and living standards - could decline this year for the first time since 1990, warns the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its report released on Thursday.

The '2020 Human Development Perspectives - COVID-19 and Human Development: Assessing the impact, envisioning the recovery' notes that declines in fundamental areas of human development are being felt across most countries - rich and poor - in every region.

The drop in human development is expected to be much higher in developing countries which are less able to cope with the pandemic's social and economic fallout than richer nations.

The Covid-19 pandemic is unleashing a human development crisis hitting hard all of human development's constitutive elements: income, health and education. The economic shock can hit countries before the health shock, through income effects, and persist after the health crisis is over, it says.

The crisis is a stark reminder that humanity is unlikely to stay healthy in the sickening planet. But the crisis showed the potential of humans to act collectively to address a shared global challenge. The response was spotty, fragmented and incoherent, but virtually everywhere billions of people changed their behaviour to face a common threat.

The pandemic was superimposed on unresolved tensions between people and technology, between people and the planet, between the haves and the have-nots. These tensions were already shaping a new generation of inequalities - pertaining to enhanced capabilities, the new necessities of the twenty-first century.

In education, with schools closed and stark divides in access to online learning, UNDP estimates show that 86 per cent of children in primary education are now effectively out-of-school in countries with low human development - compared with just 20pc in countries with very high human development.

With school closures, UNDP estimates of the 'effective out-of-school rate' - the percentage of primary school-age children, adjusted to reflect those without internet access - indicate that 60pc of children are not getting education, leading to global levels not seen since the 1980s, the UNDP report underlines.

'But with more equitable internet access - where countries close the gap with leaders in their development group something feasible - the current gaps in education could close,' it...

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