UN development report shows Guyana’s progress but maternal deaths, gender inequality still high

While Guyana has moved up two places on the United Nations Development Programme’s latest Human Development Index (HDI), where it now ranks 123rd of 189 countries, worrying indicators, including the high number of maternal deaths and significant gender inequality, persist.

According to the Human Development Report 2019, titled ‘Beyond income, beyond averages, beyond today: Inequalities in human development in the 21st century,’ Guyana remains in the Medium Human Development group of countries but is the second lowest ranked CARICOM member, ahead of only Haiti, which is in the Low Human Development group.

Guyana has a value of 0.670, with an average life expectancy of 69.8 years, an average of 11.5 expected years of schooling, and a Gross National Income of 7,615 per capita expressed in constant 2011 international dollars, converted using purchasing power parity (PPP) rates.

The report presents the 2018 HDI (values and ranks) for 189 countries and UNrecognised territories, along with the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) for 150 countries, the Gender Development Index (GDI) for 166 countries, the Gender Inequality Index (GII) for 162 countries, and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for 101 countries.

The report says that between 1990 and 2018, Guyana’s HDI value increased from 0.537 to 0.670, an increase of 24.8 per cent and the country’s life expectancy at birth increased by 6.5 years, mean years of schooling increased by 1.7 years and expected years of schooling increased by 1.4 years.

However, it also says that for every 100,000 live births in the country some 229.0 women die from pregnancy related causes, the adolescent birth rate in the country is 74.4 births per 1,000 women of ages 15 to 19, while female participation in the labour market is 41.2 per cent compared to 73.6 per cent for men.

From Latin America and the Caribbean, countries which are close to Guyana in 2018 HDI rank and to some extent in population size are Belize and Suriname, which have HDI rankings of 103 and 98, respectively

The report says while Guyana’s HDI for 2018 is 0.670, when the value is discounted for inequality, the HDI falls to 0.546, a loss of 18.5 per cent due to inequality in the distribution of the HDI dimension indices. While Belize and Suriname show losses due to inequality of 22.6 per cent and 22.7 per cent, respectively. The average loss due to inequality for medium HDI countries is 25.9 per cent and for Latin America and the Caribbean it is 22.3 per cent. The human inequality coefficient for Guyana is equal to 18.3 per cent.

In 2010 the report introduced the GII, which reflects gender-based inequalities in three dimensions: reproductive health, empowerment, and economic activity. The GII can be interpreted as the loss in human development due to inequality between female and male achievements in the three GII dimensions.

The report says that Guyana has a GII value of 0.492, ranking it 118 out of 162 countries in the 2018 index. In Guyana, 31.9 per cent of parliamentary seats are held by women, and 70.9 per cent of adult women have reached at least a secondary level of education compared to 55.5 per cent of their male counterparts.

The 2018 female HDI value for Guyana is 0.656, in contrast with 0.674 for males, resulting in a Gender Development Index (GDI) value of 0.973. In comparison, GDI values for Belize and Suriname are 0.983 and 0.972, respectively

Meanwhile, the report reveals that the most recent survey data that were publicly available for Guyana’s MPI estimation refer to 2014. It says 3.4 per cent of the population (26,000 people) are said to be multi dimensionally poor, while an additional 5.8 per cent are classified as vulnerable to multidimensional poverty (45,000 people). The breadth of deprivation (intensity) in Guyana, which is the average deprivation score experienced by people in multidimensional poverty, is recorded as 41.8 per cent. The MPI, which is the share of the population that is multi-dimensionally poor, adjusted by the intensity of the deprivations, is 0.014.

The report points out that inequalities in human development hurt societies and weaken social cohesion and people’s trust in government, institutions and each other. “They hurt economies, wastefully preventing people from reaching their full potential at work and in life. They make it harder for political decisions to reflect the aspirations of the whole society and to protect our planet, as the few pulling ahead flex their power to shape decisions primarily in their interests. Inequalities in human development are a defining bottleneck in achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” it says.