Achieving the Health-Related Millennium Development Goals in the South-East Asia Region

Member States of the WHO South-East Asia Region have made considerable efforts at providing an extra surge to their efforts down the road to achieving the targets set by the Millennium Development Goals. Since 2000, these goals have been an important yardstick for the international community to measure its progress on select vital health and socioeconomic indices. Tracking and measuring progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals has been a challenge for both individual countries as well as the global community. To operationalize and monitor progress towards achieving MDGs at the sub-national level, stratified as it is by various socioeconomic factors, and to navigate down to the male and female halves of the population is an even greater challenge.

This publication presents the achievements on MDGs by Member States of the WHO South-East Asia Region gauged only at the national level. It depicts the road covered by countries in the past 10 years and the gaps that have to be bridged in the remaining five years, along with ascertaining the likelihood of reaching each of the targets by 2015. The report also highlights the bottlenecks, the most intense challenges and the constraints faced by each country in its strategic actions and interventions.

To comply with the recommendations of UN Commission on Information and Accountability for Women's and Children's Health, this publication also presents an analysis of the related MDG indicators on women's and children's health.