Sub-Saharan Africa has achieved the fastest progress among all developing regions in making primary education available to school-age children – improving from 58 per cent enrolment in 1999 to 76 per cent in 2008, a UN reported issued in Nairobi on Thursday disclosed.

Moreover, with consistently high economic growth rates over most of the decade, the region has shown some resistance to the effects of the global recession, said the report.

The report said that the percentage of those employed relative to the total population remained steady from 2008 to 2009 at 65 per cent – slightly higher than the ratio at the end of the 1990s, and better than in any other developing region outside of Asia and the Pacific.

“Declines in output per worker however have contributed to poorer working conditions, worsening the plight of workers in a region where labour productivity was already low preceding the economic crisis,” said the report.

According to the report, some trends in the international environment have favoured growth, such as the easing of external debt and better access to rich-country markets for developing and least developed countries (33 of the region’s 50 countries are classified by the UN as least developed).

The report pointed out that the surge in mobile phone coverage and broadband Internet access – albeit from very low base lines – has accompanied the economic expansion.

But growth has not yet translated into widespread improvements in living standards, and poverty rates remain stubbornly high, according to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Report 2010, released by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York, and in regions around the world.

The report also noted that target of halving extreme poverty is in jeopardy pointing out that overall, more than half (51 per cent) of sub-Saharan Africans were living on an income of less than $1.25 a day in 2005, down only seven points from 58 per cent in 1990.

Based on World Bank projections, sub-Saharan Africa is not on track to reach the target of cutting the rate of extreme poverty (benchmarked at $1.25 a day) in half between 1990 and 2015.

The downward trend in employment classified as “vulnerable” that was gathering momentum since the year 2000,moreover, was interrupted by the economic crisis, and the share of workers in the region in these precarious positions – labouring in the informal sector or without benefits – is estimated to have increased from 75 per cent in 2008 to 77 per cent in 2009, added the report.