The Millennium Development Goals
The Millennium Development Goals are a set of goals that all the world’s countries and leading development institutions have agreed to try to achieve by 2015. The goals were introduced to encourage the international community to achieve a number of tangible improvements in the lives of the world’s poorest people.
Here are the eight Millennium Development Goals as outlined on the UN website:
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
- Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day
- Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
- Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling
- Increased enrollment must be accompanied by efforts to ensure that all children remain in school and receive a high-quality education
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 the mortality rate among children under five
5. Improve maternal health
- Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio
6. Combat HIV and AIDS, malaria and other diseases
- Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS
- Halt and begin 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 by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water
- Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020
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 least developed countries' special needs. This includes tariff- and quota-free access for their exports; enhanced debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries; 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 developing countries' debt problems through national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term
- In cooperation with the developing countries, develop decent and productive work for youth
- 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 technologies
Animation courtesy of www.developmenteducation.ie
