Veep Taylor To Launch UNDP’s Global Human Dev. Report

The United Nations Development Programme in Liberia in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance
and Development Planning, will today December 9, 2019, launch the global report on human development.
During the launch which is expected to take place at the Monrovia City Hall, Liberia’s Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor will launch the report, along with Iván Duque Márquez, President of Colombia, and Mr. Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator, in Bogota, Colombia.
Highlighting inequality and comprehensive picture of the many forms of inequality that are shaping the 21st Century, the Human Development Report will as well look at long standing forms of inequality in society, persistent gaps opening in new aspects of life.
In a release from the UNDP, the 2019 Human Development Report will also focus on understanding the dimensions of inequality most importantly 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, and only then can we design the policy options that could effectively tackle it,” UNDP Director of GHDR Pedro Conceição stated.
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 however, the report indicates that the Human Development Index-HDI value for 2018 is 0.465, which puts 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, while, between 1990 and 2018, Liberia’s life expectancy at birth increased by 17.7 years; meaning, 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 Multidimensional Poor Information-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).
Meanwhile, 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.