Millennium Development Goals

What are the Millennium Development Goals?

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 - form a blueprint agreed to by the 192 UN member states. The targets are intended to increase efforts to meet the needs of the world's poorest - reducing global poverty and increasing living standards. The goals were officially agreed upon at the 2000 Millennium Summit when world leaders adopted the UN Millennium Declaration.

The Goals

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger:
a. Halve between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of people living on less than one U.S. dollar a day.
b. Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people.
c. Halve between 1990 and 2015 the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

2. Achieve universal primary education:
a. Ensure that by 2015 all boys and girls everywhere will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.

3. Promote gender equality and empower women:
a. Close the gender gap in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015.

4. Reduce child mortality:
a. Reduce the mortality rate of children under five by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015.

5. Improve maternal health:
a. Reduce maternal mortality ratio by three quarters.
b. Achieve universal access to reproductive health.

6. Combat HIV/AIDS and other major diseases:
a. By 2015 to have halted and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.
b. By 2010 achieve universal access to HIV/AIDS treatment for all who need it.
c. By 2015 to have halted and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

7. Ensure environmental sustainability:
a. Integrate sustainable development policies and programmes into national policies and reverse the loss of environmental resources.
b. By 2010 achieve a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss.
c. Halve by 2015 the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.
d. To have achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.

8. Develop a global partnership for development:
a. Address the special needs of least developed countries, land-locked countries and small island developing states.
b. Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system.
c. Deal comprehensively with developing countries' debt.
d. In co-operation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries.
e. In co-operation with the private sector, make available benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications.

UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, called on world leaders to attend a summit in New York in September 2010, in order to map out a course of action which will accelerate progress and ensure that the MDGs are achieved by the 2015 deadline.

Controversies

While most agree that MDGs are indeed worthy targets, there is less agreement on whether or not these goals are actually achievable. Many worry that the slow progress so far will fall short of the 2015 deadline, resulting in yet more 'broken promises' to developing countries. This, in turn, may have far-reaching, negative political impacts.

The 2007 Millennium Development Goals Report, argued that the goals were still feasible and reachable by 2015 and pointed to a significant reduction in global poverty and increased education, although it did acknowledge that progress in many target areas had been slow and uneven, especially in sub-Saharan Africa where poverty, maternal mortality, infant mortality, lack of primary education, and major diseases remained most severe.

Another area of controversy is directed at developed countries who have been accused of failing to seriously implement policies aimed towards MDGs. The Netherlands ranked first on the 2007 Commitment to Development Index, followed by Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, while the UK came in 9th and the United States at 14th. The UK ranked high in the areas of foreign investment and environment, and low in migration. However, the UK and US ranked higher on a 'most improved' index.

The impact of foreign aid on developing countries is another hotly debated subject in the context of development, with many scholars and politicians questioning its benefits. Some argue that it does more harm than good, while others say that it can be a necessary evil in certain cases.

In 2009 the only countries to achieve or exceed the UN aid target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income were Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. The largest donors by volume in that year were the United States, followed by France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan.

Statistics

Conflicts are a major threat to human security and to hard-won MDG gains. More than 42 million people are currently displaced by conflict or persecution.

The global economic crisis has slowed progress, but the world is still on track to meet the poverty reduction target. The overall poverty rate is still expected to fall to 15 per cent by 2015, indicating that the MDG target can be met. This translates into around 920 million people living under the international poverty line - half the number in 1990.

Enrolment in primary education has continued to rise, reaching 89 per cent in the developing world. But the pace of progress is insufficient to ensure that, by 2015, all girls and boys complete a full course of primary schooling.

The developing regions as a whole are approaching gender parity in educational enrolment. In 2008, there were 96 girls for every 100 boys enrolled in primary school, and 95 girls for every 100 boys enrolled in secondary school. In 1999, the ratios were 91:100 and 88:100 for the two levels of education, respectively. Despite this progress, gender parity in primary and secondary education - a target that was to be met by 2005 - is still out of reach for many developing regions.

The global share of women in parliament continues to increase slowly and reached an all-time high of 19 per cent in 2010. This represents a gain of 67 per cent since 1995, when 11 per cent of parliamentarians worldwide were women. But it is far short of the target of 30 per cent of women in leadership positions that was to be met by 1995, and further still from the MDG target of gender parity.

Substantial progress has been made in reducing child deaths. Since 1990, the mortality rate for children under age five in developing countries dropped by 28 per cent - from 100 deaths per 1,000 live births to 72 in 2008. Globally, the total number of under-five deaths declined from 12.5 million in 1990 to 8.8 million in 2008. This means that, in 2008, 10,000 fewer children died each day than in 1990.
Despite these achievements, and the fact that most child deaths are preventable or treatable, many countries still have unacceptably high levels of child mortality and have made little or no progress in recent years. The highest rates of child mortality continue to be found in sub-Saharan Africa.

Preliminary data show signs of progress in relation to maternal mortality rates. However, the rate of reduction is still well short of the 5.5 per cent annual decline needed to meet the MDG target.

The latest epidemiological data indicate that, globally, the spread of HIV appears to have peaked in 1996, when 3.5 million people were newly infected. By 2008, that number had dropped to an estimated 2.7 million. AIDS-related mortality peaked in 2004, with 2.2 million deaths. By 2008, that toll had dropped to 2 million, although HIV remains the world's leading infectious killer. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most heavily affected region, accounting for 72 per cent of all new HIV infections in 2008. An estimated 33.4 million people were living with HIV in 2008, of whom 22.4 million were in sub-Saharan Africa.

Tuberculosis remains second only to HIV in the number of people it kills. In 2008, 1.8 million people died from the disease, half of whom were living with HIV. Many of these deaths resulted from the lack of antiretroviral therapy.

Global deforestation - mainly the conversion of tropical forests to agricultural land - is slowing, but continues at a high rate in many countries. Over the last decade, about 13 million hectares of forest worldwide were converted to other uses or lost through natural causes each year, compared to 16 million hectares per year in the 1990s.

By 16 September 2009, 196 parties had signed the Montreal Protocol, making it the first treaty of any kind to achieve universal ratification. All the world's governments are now legally obligated to phase out ozone depleting substances (ODSs) under the schedules defined by the Protocol. This year - 2010 - marks the beginning of a world virtually free of the most widely used ODSs, including chlorofluorocarbons and halons.

Between 1986 and 2008, global consumption of ODSs was reduced by 98 per cent. Furthermore, from 1990 to 2010, the Montreal Protocol's control measures on production and consumption of such substances will have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 135 gigatons of CO2.

The world has missed the 2010 target for biodiversity conservation, with potentially grave consequences.. the loss of biodiversity continues - unrelentingly. Nearly 17,000 species of plants and animals are known to be threatened with extinction. Based on current trends, the loss of species will continue throughout this century, with increasing risk of dramatic shifts in ecosystems and erosion of benefits for society.

Although nearly 12 per cent of the planet's land area and nearly 1 per cent of its sea area are currently under protection, other areas critical to the earth's biodiversity are not yet adequately safeguarded. In 2009, only half of the world's 821 terrestrial ecoregions had more than 10 per cent of their area protected. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, one tenth of the areas of all these ecoregions should have been under protection by 2010.

If current trends continue, the world will meet or even exceed the MDG drinking water target by 2015. By that time, an estimated 86 per cent of the population in developing regions will have gained access to improved sources of drinking water. Four regions, Northern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Asia and South-Eastern Asia, have already met the target. The most progress was made in Eastern Asia, where access to drinking water improved by almost 30 per cent over the period 1990 - 2008. Although coverage also expanded in sub-Saharan Africa - by 22 per cent over the same period - it remains very low, with only 60 per cent of the population served. Oceania saw no progress over the nearly 20-year period, and coverage remains very low, at about 50 per cent.

At the current rate of progress, the world will miss the target of halving the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation. In 2008, an estimated 2.6 billion people around the world lacked access to an improved sanitation facility. If the trend continues, that number will grow to 2.7 billion by 2015. In 2008, 48 per cent of the population in developing regions were without basic sanitation. The two regions facing the greatest challenges are sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, where 69 per cent and 64 per cent of the population, respectively, lack access.

Over the past 10 years, the share of the urban population living in slums in the developing world has declined significantly: from 39 per cent in 2000 to 33 per cent in 2010. However, in absolute terms, the number of slum dwellers in the developing world is actually growing, and will continue to rise in the near future. The progress made on the slum target has not been sufficient to offset the growth of informal settlements in the developing world, where the number of urban residents living in slum conditions is now estimated at some 828 million, compared to 657 million in 1990 and 767 million in 2000.

Despite the recent economic downturn, use of information and communications technology (ICT) continues to grow worldwide. By the end of 2009, global subscriptions to mobile cellular services had ballooned to an estimated 4.6 billion - equivalent to one mobile cellular subscription for 67 out of every 100 people. Growth in mobile telephony remains strongest in the developing world, where, by end-2009, mobile penetration had passed the 50 per cent mark.

A challenge in bringing more people online in developing countries is the limited availability of broadband networks. By the end of 2008, fixed broadband penetration in the developing world averaged less than 3 per cent and was heavily concentrated in a few countries. China - the largest fixed broadband market in the world - accounts for about half of the 200 million fixed broadband subscriptions.

Source: Millennium Development Goals Report - 2010

Quotes:

"The Millennium Development Goals are still attainable. The critical question today is how to transform the pace of change from what we have seen over the last decade into dramatically faster progress."

Sha Zukang, Under Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs - 2010

"Meeting the goals is everyone's business. Falling short would multiply the dangers of our world - from instability to epidemic diseases to environmental degradation. But achieving the goals will put us on a fast track to a world that is more stable, more just, and more secure.
Billions of people are looking to the international community to realise the great vision embodied in the Millennium Declaration. Let us keep that promise."

Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General - 2010