Human Development Report says Ethiopia has work to do

Ethiopia is ranked 173 out of 189 in the 2019 version of the Human Development Index (HDI) placing it at the back of the pack when it comes to the HDI criteria. The Index looks at long-term progress in three human development dimensions: life expectancy, economic standard of living and access to education.
Launched on Tuesday, December 10, 2019 at Skylight Hotel in Addis Ababa under the theme: “beyond income, beyond averages, beyond today: inequalities in human development in the 21st century,” the 2019 Human Development Report (HDP), says, new inequalities are becoming more pronounced particularly around tertiary education, seismic effects of technology and the climate crisis making it harder for those already behind to catch up.
Human development: the Human Development Index (HDI), the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), the Gender Development Index (GDI), the Gender Inequality Index (GII), and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The final section covers five dashboards: quality of human development, life-course gender gap, women’s empowerment, environmental sustainability, and socioeconomic sustainability.
The report, which pioneers a more precise way to measure countries’ socioeconomic progress, notes that life expectancy, has increased by more than 11 years between the years 1990 and 2018 and stress on the need to emphasis on early childhood and lifelong investment including investing in young children’s learning, health, and nutrition to tackle inequality.
“Countries should go beyond income and averages among others to deal with inequalities, it is beyond income. Income and wealth are important measures of inequality; but you have to look at for example of health, of education, of dignity and respect for human rights,” says Turhan Saleh, UNDP Ethiopia Resident Representative.
“If inequalities in human development persist and grow the aspirations of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development will remain unfulfilled,” the report further stressed.
Inequalities in human development are a defining bottleneck in achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Inequalities in human development are not just about disparities in income and wealth.
The most recent survey data publicly available for Ethiopia’s MPI estimation refer to 2016. In Ethiopia, 83.5 percent of the population (87,643 thousand people) are multidimensionally poor while an additional 8.9 percent are classified as vulnerable to multidimensional poverty (9,322 thousand people). The breadth of deprivation (intensity) in Ethiopia, which is the average deprivation score experienced by people in multidimensional poverty, is 58.5 percent
Policy choices determine inequality outcomes – as they do the evolution and impact of climate change or the direction of technology, both of which will shape inequalities over the next few decades. Inequalities in human development hurt societies and weaken social cohesion and people’s trust in government, institutions and each other. They hurt economies, wastefully preventing people from reaching their full potential at work and in life.