Millennium Development Goals

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The MDGs in the United Nations Headquarters in New-York

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight international development goals that 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organizations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. They include reducing extreme poverty, reducing child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS, and developing a global partnership for development.[1]

Contents

[edit] Background

Heads of State at the Millennium Summit

In 2001, recognizing the need to assist impoverished nations more aggressively, UN member states adopted the targets. The MDGs aim to spur development by improving social and economic conditions in the world's poorest countries.

They derive from earlier international development targets[2], and were officially established at the Millennium Summit in 2000, where all world leaders present adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, from which the eight goals were promoted.

[edit] Progress

Progress towards reaching the goals has been uneven. Some countries have achieved many of the goals,[3] while others are not on track to realize any.[4] The major countries that have been achieving their goals include China (whose poverty population has reduced from 452 million to 278 million) and India due to clear internal and external factors of population and economic development. [5] However, areas needing the most reduction, such as the Sub-Saharan Africa regions have yet to make any drastic changes in improving their quality of life. In the same time as China, the Sub-Saharan Africa reduced their poverty about one percent, and are at a major risk of not meeting the MDGs by 2015. [6] Fundamental issues will determine whether or not the MDGs are achieved, namely gender, the divide between the humanitarian and development agendas and economic growth, according to the Overseas Development Institute. [7]

To accelerate progress towards the MDGs, the G-8 Finance Ministers met in London in June 2005 (in preparation for the G-8 Gleneagles Summit in July) and reached an agreement to provide enough funds to the World Bank, the IMF, and the African Development Bank (ADB) to cancel an additional $40-55 billion debt owed by members of the HIPC. This would allow impoverished countries to re-channel the resources saved from the forgiven debt to social programs for improving health and education and for alleviating poverty.[8]

Backed by G-8 funding, the World Bank, the IMF, and the ADB each endorsed the Gleaneagles plan and implemented the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative ("MDRI") to effectuate the debt cancellations. The MDRI supplements HIPC by providing each country that reaches the HIPC completion point 100% forgiveness of its multilateral debt. Countries that previously reached the decision point became eligible for full debt forgiveness once their lending agency confirmed that the countries had continued to maintain the reforms implemented during HIPC status. Other countries that subsequently reach the completion point automatically receive full forgiveness of their multilateral debt under MDRI.[8]

While the World Bank and ADB limit MDRI to countries that complete the HIPC program, the IMF's MDRI eligibility criteria are slightly more expansive so as to comply with the IMF's unique "uniform treatment" requirement. Instead of limiting eligibility to HIPC countries, any country with annual per capita income of $380 or less qualifies for MDRI debt cancellation. The IMF adopted the $380 threshold because it closely approximates the countries eligible for HIPC.[8]

[edit] Goals

The percentage of the world's population living on less than $1 per day has halved in twenty years. Most of this improvement has occurred in East and South Asia. The graph shows the 1981-2001 period.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were developed out of the eight chapters of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000. The eight goals and 21 targets include

  1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
    • Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day.
    • Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people.
    • Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
  2. Achieve universal primary education
    • Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.
  3. Promote gender equality and empower women
    • Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015.
  4. Reduce child mortality
    • Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate.
  5. Improve maternal health
  6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
    • Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.
    • Achieve, by 2010, universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it.
    • Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
  7. Ensure environmental sustainability
    • Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources.
    • Reduce biodiversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss.
    • Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation (for more information see the entry on water supply).
    • By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum-dwellers.
  8. Develop a global partnership for development
    • Develop further an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory. Includes a commitment to good governance, development and poverty reduction—nationally and internationally.
    • Address the special needs of the least developed countries. This includes tariff and quota free access for their exports; enhanced programme of debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries; and cancellation of official bilateral debt; and more generous official development assistance for countries committed to poverty reduction.
    • Address the special needs of landlocked and small island developing States.
    • Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries through national and international measures in order to make debt sustainable in the long term.
    • In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries.
    • In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications.

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml
  2. ^ OECD Development Co-operation Directorate - About the Millennium Development Goals
  3. ^ http://www.mdgmonitor.org/country_progress.cfm?c=BRA&cd=
  4. ^ http://www.mdgmonitor.org/country_progress.cfm?c=BEN&cd=
  5. ^ http://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/rburgess/wp/jep11.pdf
  6. ^ http://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/rburgess/wp/jep11.pdf
  7. ^ "Achieving the MDGs: The fundamentals". Overseas Development Institute. September 2008. http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/odi-publications/briefing-papers/43-mdgs-fundamentals-poverty-social-protection.pdf. 
  8. ^ a b c E. Carrasco, C.McClellan, & J. Ro (2007), "Foreign Debt: Forgiveness antetretetred Repudiation" University of Iowa Center for International Finance and Development E-Book

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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