Sub-Saharan Africa: The human costs of the 2015 'business-as-usual' scenario

With 10 years to go to the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target date of 2015, current trends will leave most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa far short of most targets. The gap between trend and target can be expressed in statistics. But behind the statistics are human costs. This note provides a preliminary assessment of the potential scale of these costs. It draws on a global trend projection analysis developed by UNDP’s Human Development Report Office (HDRO). The analysis uses country-by-country data for the period 1990-2003 to build global and regional aggregates that capture changes in the distribution of poverty, child mortality, children out of school and other indicators.