A/HRC/31/77 health. The Independent Expert has made this recommendation previously to the national authorities and to the international community, but there has not been any significant headway in this regard in the country. 24. The Independent Expert met with the Minister of Education, who shared the former’s concern that this should be treated as a matter of urgency and resolved as soon as possible. The Minister emphasized that he preferred to speak of “citizenship education” rather than “literacy” as a way of moving away from paternalistic mentalities. He added that his office was in the process of preparing the post-2015 education agenda, which would include preschool education and citizenship education. 25. The Minister said he would like to see his Ministry’s budget doubled. The country’s education budget, which was not insignificant in relative terms (5 per cent of the gross domestic product and 16 per cent of the national budget), was still insufficient in absolute terms. 26. The Independent Expert hopes that the eradication of illiteracy will be made a priority in Haiti and that it will become a reality reasonably soon. He encourages the Government of Haiti to step up its efforts to eradicate illiteracy in the shortest time frame possible so as to lay a solid foundation for the realization of human rights in the country. He again invites the entire international community to support this effort and to coordinate international cooperation with the Government in this area. (b) Other aspects of economic, social and cultural rights that merit particular attention 27. In the Independent Expert’s two previous reports, it was stated that the majority of Haitians lived in conditions of extreme poverty, considering that 60 per cent earn less than US$ 1 per day; unemployment stands at 60 per cent; in the Global Hunger Index, Haiti had a score of 23.3, placing it in the category of “alarming”; over 44 per cent of the population suffers from malnutrition; 74 per cent of families live in slums; 2 60 per cent of the population lacks access to basic health care, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF); and almost half of the country’s boys and girls do not attend school, with only 2 per cent of school-age children completing secondary education.3 28. The Strategic Development Plan of Haiti is built around five priorities: (a) education and human and social development (access to education, health, social services and culture, and better quality of habitat); (b) the environment and land use; (c) the economy and employment; (d) energy; and (e) the rule of law and democracy. The outgoing government had aimed to halve the number of people suffering from hunger by the end of 2016 and to eradicate hunger and malnutrition fully by 2025. 29. Although Haiti has made significant progress on most of the Millennium Development Goal indicators and has reached all (or almost all) of its targets,4 according to a report on the Millennium Development Goals and Haiti, significant challenges remain and the progress made in some sectors is still too limited to have a major impact on development and poverty reduction. 5 Among those challenges, the report mentions inequality; the low income levels of 45 per cent of workers, who live on less than US$1.25 2 3 4 5 6 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Haiti, “2013 MDG report: Haiti — a new look”, (Port-au-Prince, UNDP, 2014). Available from www.ht.undp.org/content/haiti/fr/ home/library/mdg/rapport-omd-2013---haiti-un-nouveau-regard/. See www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/corporate/HDR/HDR%202015/HumanDevelopment Report_EN.pdf. UNDP and Haiti, “2013 MDG report: Haiti — a new look”, executive summary, p. 7. Ibid. GE.16-01946