16 Oct 2022

Assistant Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Mr Mabuse Pule and UNDP resident representative, Mr Balazs Horvath will tomorrow launch the UNDP report on Global Human Development in Francistown.

 A press release from UNDP says the 2021/22 Human Development Report is the third and final installment in a trilogy of reports including the 2019 Report on Inequalities and the 2020 Report on the Risks of the Anthropocene.

“The 2021/2022 Human Development Report is the latest in the series of global Human Development Reports published by the UNDP since 1990 as independent, analytically and empirically grounded discussions of major development issues, trends and policies,” says the media release.

It says the latest Human Development Report: Uncertain Times, Unsettled Lives: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World, argues that layers of uncertainty are stacking up and interacting to unsettle life in unprecedented ways.

“The last two years have had a devastating impact on billions of people around the world, when crises like COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine hit back-to-back, and interacted with sweeping social and economic shifts, dangerous planetary change, and massive increases in polarisation,” says the media release.

It says for the first time in 32 years, the Human Development Index, which measures a nation’s health, education and standard of living, has declined globally for two years in a row.  It added that human development had fallen back to its 2016 levels, reversing much of the progress toward the SDGs.

“The reversal is nearly universal as over 90 per cent of countries registered a decline in their HDI score in either 2020 or 2021 and more than 40 per cent declined in both years, signaling that the crisis is still deepening for many,” states the media release. ENDS