TIRANA, Sept. 8, 2022 – For the first time in the 32 years that UNDP has been calculating it, the Human Development Index, which measures nations’ health, education, and standard of living, has declined globally for two years in a row. Human development has fallen back to its 2016 levels.
The past three years have not been good ones for humanity, with the world lurching from crisis to crisis, trapped in a cycle of firefighting, without a sharp change of course, we may be heading towards even more deprivations and injustices, warns the United Nations Development Program in its latest Human Development Report. .
The last two years have had a devastating impact for billions of people around the world, when crises like COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine hit back-to-back, and interacted with sweeping social and economic shifts, dangerous planetary changes, and massive increases in polarization.
Though Albania has suffered like the rest of the world, its HDI value for 2021 is 0.796, which keeps the country in the high human development category, ranking at 67 out of 191 countries and territories. In 2019, Albania ranked 69th. The word’s wealthiest countries are in the very high category, which includes much of the EU.
Albania did particularly well in the Gender Inequality Index — which reflects gender-based inequalities in three dimensions – reproductive health, empowerment, and labor market — with Albania ranking 39th out of 170 countries.
Much of the world is backtracking, with over 90 percent of countries registered a decline in their HDI score in either 2020 or 2021 and more than 40 percent declined in both years, signaling that the crisis is still deepening for many.
“The world is scrambling to respond to back-to-back crises. We have seen with the cost of living and energy crises that, while it is tempting to focus on quick fixes like subsidizing fossil fuels, immediate relief tactics are delaying the long-term systemic changes we must make,” says Achim Steiner, UNDP administrator. “We are collectively paralyzed in making these changes. In a world defined by uncertainty, we need a renewed sense of global solidarity to tackle our interconnected, common challenges.”
