Millennium Development Goals

Millennium Development Goals

In 2000, leaders from 189 nations signed on to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight ambitious targets designed to significantly reduce global poverty and disease by 2015. By setting time-bound, measurable targets for achieving results in areas like child and maternal health, education and access to water and sanitation, they injected new momentum into the fight against global poverty.

Achieving these important development goals depends on a partnership between developing countries and donor governments. Much like the partnership envisioned by the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), the MDGs and the Gleneagles Communique, there are critical roles that must be played by all in order to achieve real results in the fight against global poverty. Recipient countries must lead the way by prioritizing good governance, investing in the well-being of their people and devising transparent and accountable development plans alongside civil society. Developed countries must be supportive of these policy decisions and should reinforce the choices and priorities that are made by countries in the best interest of their people. Developed countries should also lead in ensuring that developing countries have a sustainable, accountable system for financing development.

Since 2000, tangible results prove that dramatic progress is possible when developing countries and donor governments fulfill their ends of the bargain: debt cancellation has saved African countries $70 billion, which along with targeted aid for education helped send an additional 29 million more African children to school for the first time; increased global resources for health has helped almost three million HIV-positive people receive life-saving ARV medicine and delivered over 59 million bed nets to protect families from malaria.

Despite these successes, much more needs to be done to ensure that development goals are met by 2015, especially in Africa, which is the region farthest off-track from reaching the goals:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger: Around the world, over one billion people survive on less than a dollar a day and one person in seven goes to bed hungry each night.
2. Provide universal primary education: Expanded access to education generates widespread development returns in areas like health and economic and political development, yet 72 million children are currently out of school across the world.
3. Promote gender equality: Although gender empowerment is a critical component of development, women still bear the brunt of global poverty and disease. Women work longer hours earning less money, face fewer educational and political opportunities and are more vulnerable to failures of weak health systems and diseases like HIV/AIDS than their male counterparts.
4. Reduce child mortality: Every year, nearly 10 million children die before their fifth birthday - that's one every three seconds - nearly all of them from preventable or treatable diseases like diarrhea, pneumonia and measles.
5. Improve the health of mothers: Every year, over half a million mothers die from complications during child birth, and tens of millions more suffer from pregnancy related illnesses and injuries.
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria: Although HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria are entirely preventable and treatable, they are three of the world's most devastating diseases: in 2007, HIV/AIDS killed more than 2 million people, tuberculosis killed 1.7 million and at least one million people died of malaria.
7. Ensure environmental sustainability: Over one billion people across the world lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion do not have access to basic sanitation, deficits that are projected to widen with emerging threats such as climate change and population growth.
8. Build a global partnership for development: Success in achieving the first seven goals requires a new compact of global cooperation through which developing countries and donor governments prioritize development and build a sustainable and accountable system to finance it.

Midway to 2015, world leaders face an historic opportunity to renew the fight against extreme poverty by reaffirming their commitment to development and leveraging new resources to achieve their agreed-upon goals. Along with leaders, campaigns and citizens across the world, ONE is working to mobilize broad-based support for achieving the MDGs and holding world leaders to account for the targets and commitments they set to reach them.

source: http://www.one.org/international/issues/