How inclusive is growth in the Asia-Pacific region?

On September 25, 2015, the international community adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a framework that comprises, as a succession to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with 169 corresponding targets. This framework, which is the culmination of years of deliberations and negotiations that have taken place since the Rio+20 outcome document, The future we want, will guide the formulation of development policies for the next 15 years. The Asia-Pacific region made tremendous progress towards reaching the MDGs. On the back of impressive economic growth, millions of people were lifted out of extreme poverty to the extent that the region reached before the 2015 deadline the first target under the Millennium Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger by halving the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day. Yet, the region still faces significant development challenges. Thus, while it is still home to more than 740 million people, accounting for two-thirds of the world’s extremely poor, the region faces an unfinished development agenda in the areas of health, education, gender equality, decent employment and access to safe sanitation and drinking water: an estimated 21 million children are not enrolled in primary school, and 1 in 5 children under age of five, representing 75 million children in total, are underweight. A staggering 1.7 billion people still lack access to safe sanitation.