FIJI’S human development index (HDI) is above the average of countries in East Asia and the Pacific, says Acting Prime Minister and Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.
He highlighted this during the launch of the Human Development Report 2016 in Suva yesterday.
The report by the United Nations Development Programme focuses on how development can be assured for everyone.
According to the report, Fiji’s HDI value for 2015 was 0.736.
“This puts Fiji in the high human development category positioning, 91 out of the 188 countries and territories,” Mr Sayed-Khaiyum said. “Obviously, there is a clear progression. We’ve also done some further analysis and that is, if you take the nine-year period from 1999 to 2009, Fiji’s HDI value increased from 0.666 to 0.698.
“Then if you look at the index from 2007 to 2015, there has been a growth of 5.5 per cent compared with growth 4.8 per cent for the same period.
“On average, annualised growth of 0.61 per cent so obviously we are doing way better in the fact that Government has provided focus on such things as access to education and putting in more funding for medical services, but also at the same time addressing areas such as looking after the disabled people a lot more and providing some mainstreaming for them, whether it’s in terms of employment opportunities or whether it’s in terms of direct funding to respective organisations.”
United Nations assistant secretary general and director of the Bureau of External Relations and Advocacy at UNDP Michael O’Neill said the concept of the report highlighted the need for development to be looked at in a way more than simply the way of measuring income.
