Social Progress Imperative

Social progress Imperative (SPI), an American Non profit organization published their report on April 2014 (Social progress Imperative Report 2014). They define social progress as "the capacity of a society to meet the basic human needs of its citizens, establish the building blocks that allow citizens and communities to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives, and create the conditions for all individuals to reach their full potential". They Measures the society’s progress on major three dimensions they are Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Well being and Opportunity with four components of each dimension. 

These indexes highlight the very different strengths and weaknesses of individual countries.
The top three countries in the world in terms of social progress are New Zealand, Switzerland, and Iceland and bottom three are Burundi, Central African Republic and Chad are bottom three whereas Nepal stands at 101th position (Nepal Scorecard) out of 132 countries. The Social Progress Index provides evidence that extreme poverty and poor social performance often go hand-in-hand.

Social progress Index yields insights such as economic development alone is not sufficient to explain social progress outcomes and some aspects of social progress are more highly correlated with GDP than others.

In context of Nepal, as the government’s investments remains comparatively low, the country have to struggle to sustain its economic growth and social progress. In a country of haves and have-nots progress will never be truly inclusive until the public and private sectors works together to tackle the issues head on. The agriculture dominated country having around 1/4^th of total GDP contribution by remittance sector exporting labor and economic growth is almost stagnant since decade expectation of better result is not worthy.

Over the last year, the Social Progress Index have been adopted as an official measure of national performance by the government of Paraguay and already is guiding public and private investment choices there. In Brazil, social entrepreneurs and businesses have adopted the index as a tool to understand community needs and inform interventions to advance social progress.

Measuring social progress will guide us in translating economic gains into social progress, and advancing social and environmental performance in ways that will unleash even greater economic success. So in Nepal also such indexes are essential to adopt by government while setting the policies for the sustainable growth with social progress immediately that are utmost necessary to address the imminent problem.