Ethiopia continues to improve HDI

Health sector improves as education, income lag

The 2018 National Development Report from the UNDP has indicated that Ethiopia continues to improve its health system where as indicators such as education and income are said to be behind expectations.

The Report which was officially released on December 12, 2018 at Sheraton Addis Hotel focused on the theme, “industrialization with Human Face”.

In this regard, it stressed on the point where industrialization should be implemented in a way to improve the lives of Ethiopians and has to be ‘climate smart.’

In the general sense of it, the report indicated that Ethiopia has shown a progress in the past 15 years when it comes to Human Development Index (HDI).

According to the report,“The HDI for all regions has increased since the 2012/13 period and the Health SubIndex remains the driver of human development levels across all sub-regional states.”

However,“Harari region is the only region to have slipped backwards on the Health Sub-Index, but has made the strongest progress on Education and Income Sub-Indices.”

In addition, the report further indicates that even if there is an improvement in education attainment, there are high gender and rural-urban disparities as well as the overall level of education which still remains low.

Furthermore, according to the report, “The proportion of illiterate people – people who have not attended any form of education including non-formal education – aged 10 years and above decreased from 70 percent to 42 percent between 1999 and 2013.”These shares decreased from 59 percent to 32 percent and from 81 percent to 51 percent, for men and women, respectively.

In contrary to this, there is also high gender and rural-urban disparity where 32 percent of men and 51 percent of women aged 10 years and above were illiterate,” reads the report.

On the same token, there is progress in a trend of using modern contraceptive by married women over the last 16 years in Ethiopia.

In this regard,only six percent of married women used to use modern contraceptive in 2000.This figure in 2016 has improvedto 35 percent.

The report finally recommends the government to create “a competitive manufacturing growth and use it as an instrument for inclusive and sustainable human development.”

It also indicated that the government has to invest more on youth and women and make sure those sections of the society are not left behind.

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