UNDP Liberia Launches 2019 Report

The United Nations Development Programme in Liberia will on 09 December launch its 2019 Global Human Development Report (GHDR) in Monrovia at the Monrovia City Hall beginning at 9:00 am.
The Report is expected to be launched by the Vice President of Liberia, Jewel Howard Taylor.
The report highlights inequality and provides a comprehensive picture of the many forms of inequality that are shaping the 21st Century.
In all societies, long-standing forms of inequality persist while gaps are opening in new aspects of life. The 2019 Human Development Report will focus on understanding the dimensions of inequality most important to people’s well-being, and what is behind them.
“While many believe inequality is critically important, there is much less agreement on why it matters and what to do about it. We need to sharpen measurement to better describe what inequality looks like and to have a deeper understanding of how inequality will change given the economic, social and environmental transformations that are unfolding worldwide. Only then can we design the policy options that could effectively tackle it.” – said Pedro Conceição, Director of the Human Development Report Office at UNDP.
The report goes beyond the dominant discourse on income disparities to also consider inequalities in other dimensions such as health, education, access to technologies, and exposure to economic and climate-related shocks. It will use new data and methods that will highlight how inequality affects people’s lives; and it will take a long-term view towards 2030 and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and beyond.
The 2019 report builds upon the rich history of human development reporting in pioneering new measures of development and upon new partnerships with global experts.
For Liberia, the report indicates that HDI value for 2018 is 0.465— which put the country in the low human development category— positioning it at 176 out of 189 countries and territories. Between 2000 and 2018, Liberia’s HDI value increased from 0.422 to 0.465, an increase of 10.2 percent. Between 1990 and 2018, Liberia’s life expectancy at birth increased by 17.7 years, mean years of schooling increased by 2.1 year, but expected years of schooling decreased by 0.9 years. Liberia’s Gross National Income (GNI) per capita increased by about 12.7 percent between 1990 and 2018.
While some progress has been made over the years in terms of the consolidation of peace, there is still high rate of multidimensional poverty, hence, salience of the government’s anti-poverty drive, through its Pro-Poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development. The most recent survey data that were publicly available for Liberia’s MPI estimation refer to 2013. In Liberia, 62.9 percent of the population (2,978 thousand people) are multidimensionally poor while an additional 21.4 percent are classified as vulnerable to multidimensional poverty (1,011 thousand people). The breadth of deprivation (intensity) in Liberia, which is the average deprivation score experienced by people in multidimensional poverty, is 50.8 percent. The MPI, which is the share of the population that is multidimensionally poor, adjusted by the intensity of the deprivations, is 0.320. Central African Republic and Guinea-Bissau have MPIs of 0.465 and 0.372 respectively. Nevertheless, Liberia has outperformed these comparator countries in terms of progress on environmental and social sustainability, given some of the recent policy and programmatic measures, including the coastal defense, health and education and attention to climate change.
There is considerable gender inequality in Liberia. Liberia has a Gender Inequality Index value (GII) value of 0.651, ranking it 155 out of 162 countries in the 2018 index. In Liberia, about 11.7 percent of parliamentary seats are held by women, and 18.5 percent of adult women have reached at least a secondary level of education compared to 39.6 percent of their male counterparts. For every 100,000 live births, 725.0 women die from pregnancy related causes; and the adolescent birth rate is 136.0 births per 1,000 women of ages 15-19. Female participation in the labor market is 54.7 percent compared to 57.5 for men.