Global gridlock, growing polarisation hurting human development, says new report
The 2023- 2024 Human development report (HDR) themed “Breaking the Gridlock: Reimagining cooperation in a polarized world”, was globally launched on 13 March 2024 in New York, USA and a domesticated Launch of Uganda on 20th March 2024 At Makere university by the United nations development programmes in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Among many things, highlights that the world is failing to act on shared global challenges and facing ‘a global gridlock’, exacerbated by growing polarization.
The report further explores how to enhance collective action in addressing global challenges in an interconnected and often polarized world, building on the previous trilogy of human development reports namely 2019 HDR on inequality, the 2020 HDR on planetary changes of the Anthropocene, and 2021-2022 HDR on emerging “uncertainty complex” .
The HDR opens a new trilogy of human development reports that will explore further layers including uncertainty identified in the latest HDR: how to address polarization (2023-24), shape our shared digital future to advance human development (2025), and marshal human aspirations to navigate the Anthropocene (2026).
The report highlights findings and recommendations to Uganda to achieve the demographic dividend looking at the population demography and as well as positioning itself for cooperation in the World’s polarized context.
The united nations outed the first human development report In the 1990s with an introduction of a new Human Development Index (HDI) to measure development progress with an underlying principle that national development should be measured not simply by per capita income, as had long been the practice, but also by health and educational achievements.
More than 800 global, regional, national, and sub-national HDRs have been produced coupled with hundreds of workshops, conferences, and other outreach initiatives to foster human development.
Such engagements extend frontiers of analytical thinking about human progress beyond economic growth, firmly placing people and human well-being at the centre of development policies and strategies.
The findings of the 2023-2024 HDR also come at A time as Uganda prepares for the Summit of the Future scheduled for September 2024, also a moment off the heels of the recently concluded Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and G-77 +China Summits which Uganda took chairmanship of and thus an opportunity for Uganda to share outcomes of these summits in the context of promoting South-South cooperation in the areas of trade, investment, sustainable development, climate change, poverty eradication, among others.
