Problems which plague developing nations

Emerging economies everywhere face rising debts, and some, like Zambia and Argentina, have already defaulted. And the World Bank estimates that the pandemic may have pushed up to 40 million people in Africa into extreme poverty.

Although systematic data regarding its economic impact are not yet available, anecdotal evidence paints a gloomy picture. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, the 7 million jobs lost in April caused the national unemployment rate to jump to 8 percent, from 6. Moreover, youth unemployment in India already reached an all-time high of The regular reports of dead bodies being dumped into the River Ganges and washing up in small Indian towns and cities indicate the tragic severity.

But they are also tell-tale signs of a brewing economic crisis. For Hindus, not being able to acquire logs and find space to cremate the dead is a desperate situation. Only in cases of extreme poverty would they abandon this effort and throw corpses into the river.

Another sobering account comes from the two women who run Nanritam, a remarkable NGO that operates a school and an eye hospital in a remote part of West Bengal. They told me how registration at their school is down to nearly half its normal level.

When Nanritam recently announced its usual simple relief dole for the poor living around their campus, the NGO was taken aback by some who walked and cycled for miles to get it. While gains have been made and the push will continue, UNICEF estimates that million people still will be without access to safe water supplies and 1.

Another problem is the difficulty of persuading the people to change eons of habit by using latrines, which they view as confining and a nuisance to maintain. In one Mexican village where health workers finally managed to get the residents to use newly installed pit latrines, the cooperation ended abruptly when a child fell through the seat opening. Although a wide selection of anti-worm drugs have been available for some time, physicians working in the developing world have been reluctant to use them on a wide scale.

They believe that the absence of adequate sanitation facilities and good hygiene make widespread drug treatment economically useless because individuals soon become reinfected. Recently, however, there have been signs that the traditional attitude toward drug treatment may be changing--but not without opposition from those who fear that treatment may lead to diminished attention to prevention through sanitation. In the last several years new studies have indicated that treating heavily infected children within a community has health benefits to the whole community that may justify the cost--even though the youngsters subsequently do become reinfected.

According to Dr. Michael C. Latham, director of the international nutrition program at Cornell University, studies over the last five years are revealing that the health consequences of infection in children--the most vulnerable age group--are far more serious than previously believed.

For example, of the 1 billion people infected with roundworm, about a million acquire intestinal obstructions that result in between 50, and , deaths a year, according to Latham.

Roundworms, hookworms and whipworms also enhance the debilitating effects of malnutrition by causing anemia or decreasing absorption of nutrients or sapping the energy that comes from the protein in food, resulting in stunted growth and increased vulnerability to other infections. In a recent study conducted in Kenya, Latham and other researchers from the Kenya Medical Research Institute and McMaster University in Canada showed that treating children with a single dose of an anti-worm drug, albendazole, brought highly significant improvements in growth rates over untreated children.

The drug is seen as valuable because it is effective against each of the life-cycle stages of all three kinds of worms. Treating a few thousand children in a study and getting good results is one thing, said Dr. Gender inequality is another social issue ram pant in Nepal today, even in spite of the mass immigration of predominantly male workers abr oad in search of work when women are left responsible for farms, homes and local businesses.

Why is that? Take this example — in rural regions of Nepal, women are often left responsible for cultivating land and the keep of liv estock 1.

Due to the patriarchal nature of Nepalese society, economic abuse is commonly used against women with men claiming the entirety of access to shared funds and belittling women by monitoring their basic spending habits. Overall, from the onset, Nepali women are doomed to live a life associated with difficulties. Speaking from experience as a firstborn Nepali girl, the inequality in treatment between children is immense. One memory I have is of my brother, seven years younger than I, receiving golden bangles and gifts from my Brahmin grandparents while I received none.

I was lucky enough to have a mother who encouraged me to succeed in life and prove everyone wrong, however, many girls growing up in conservative Nepali families, especially in rural regions, do not meet the same fate.

If they do have the opportunity to go to work, it is often far more labour intensive than that of men and they work 3 hours more a day on average.

It is frequently the case that in search for work, Nepalese women emigrate to places like Lebanon or Saudi Arabia, lured by promises of a better life, better work conditions and better pay, when in reality her work permit is handed to her employer under the karfala system and if she dares speak out against an abusive employer, she risks immediate deportation. Work in India is a whole other story, as due to the open border between India and Nepal, women are at a very high risk of hard labour or sexual trafficking.

Border police are often bribed into turning a blind eye to the sexual trafficking of approximately Nepalese women who often end up in brothels in India.

Women are often left impoverished as a result and make up much of the Nepali population which resides in poverty. Achieving female empowerment in Nepal is one of the challenges of sustainable development there as extreme poverty is not a sustainable status quo. There are initiatives being created in order to facilitate the accessibility to microloans to women in rural regions, in order to disincentives their migration abroad, such as the Volunteers Initiative Nepal and UN Women and the UNFPA play a significant role in securing health services and education on sexual health for women.

Nepal is a very unique example of a developing country due to its culture, political practices and geopolitical location and not all development projects active in Nepal can be applied to many other developing countries, however, it helps in the illustration of how challenging sustainable development can be for many countries and how very important achieving it is.

Hopefully, a liquidation of the corruption in the political system will make headway for positive change, nevertheless, owing to its long-running roots in Nepal, that day will probably not arrive for many a year and sustainable development will have to continue to be led by citizen-led initiatives and NGOs.

However, the latter of the two faces its own internal problems and its own form of corruption many foreign humanitarian workers come to Nepal for the easy money and not entirely out of purer aspirations so it can prove to be inefficient. The future may not be bright for Nepal, nevertheless, there is a future in store for the country and it is up to the government, Nepali citizens and the international community to decide how it pans out.

In spite of the very difficult circumstances in which many developing countries currently find themselves in, sustainable development is achievable, however, it would require a lot of concentrated and coordinated effort.

If appropriate supply-side policies, such as education and vocational programmes, were to be implemented, illiteracy rates would drop and people would be made more aware about the environment surrounding them which would contribute greatly to a rise in environmental awareness. In addition, an appropriate government, which prioritized the growth of green GDP instead of GDP measured by the usual methods, would have to come into power and use its budget efficiently in order to invest in green energies, health services, and benefits systems, amongst others.

Of course, this is only touching the tip of the iceberg, nevertheless, it illustrates very well that sustainable development is achievable and straightforward, however, each of the steps underlined above are incredibly hard to achieve.

Concluding, sustainable development is achievable, however, it is only achievable is everyone is dedicated to achieving it. In order for this to happen, the world needs a wakeup call of cosmic dimensions — the only worry is it might be too late by then. Video explanation of Sustainable Development. Report on Sustainable Development in Cuba. Nepal and SDGs.