One third of Latin Amer­ica is likely to meet the Mil­len­nium Devel­op­ment Goals accord­ing to Ali­cia Bárcena, exec­u­tive sec­re­tary of the Eco­nomic Com­mis­sion for Latin Amer­ica and the Caribbean. In an inter­view with IPS she says the goals of child health and pri­mary edu­ca­tion will be met. Barcena talked to reporter Suzanne Hoeksema.

IPS: When talk­ing about the Mil­len­nium Devel­op­ment Goals, which Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean coun­tries are expected to meet which goals and which coun­tries are still lag­ging behind?

ALICIA BÁRCENA: Chile is doing remark­ably well and it will most likely be able to stick to the first MDG, reduc­ing extreme poverty by 50 per­cent. In Hon­duras, on the other hand, the sit­u­a­tion is wor­ri­some with 49.4 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion still liv­ing under con­di­tions of extreme poverty.

Uruguay, Argentina, Costa Rica, Brazil, Panama, Venezuela and Mex­ico have made con­sid­er­able improve­ments in terms of poverty reduc­tion and invest­ing in the poor. How­ever, the dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth and fill­ing the inequal­ity gap remains a huge chal­lenge, par­tic­u­larly in Brazil and Mexico.

One of the continent’s major suc­cesses in fight­ing poverty is the Con­di­tional Cash Trans­fer pro­gramme (CCT) which pro­vides money directly to poor fam­i­lies via a social con­tract with the ben­e­fi­cia­ries – send­ing chil­dren to school and bring­ing them to health cen­tres. Cash pro­vides emer­gency assis­tance, while the con­di­tion­al­i­ties pro­mote longer-term invest­ments in human capital.

CCT has proved to be notably suc­cess­ful when pro­vided to women. The pro­gramme does not only make women more inde­pen­dent, it also ben­e­fits other MDGs such as pri­mary school atten­dance by boys and girls and children’s health. I expect that most coun­tries will meet both of these goals.

Unfor­tu­nately, mater­nal mor­tal­ity remains high. The mater­nal health MDG will not be eas­ily met. First and fore­most in the rural ori­ented coun­tries, women have lim­ited access to health care or they choose to deal with inti­mate health issues themselves.

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