United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

Undp Goals and Initiatives

The umbrella goal of the UNDP is to cut world poverty in half by 2015; that goal is supported by seeking to achieve in the same year eight subsidiary Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), so named because they were derived from the September 2000 UN Millennium Summit. The MDGs are to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop the Global Partnership for Development endorsed at the March 2002 International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, and reaffirmed in August 2002 at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development.

The goal of achieving environmental sustainability is rooted in the idea that developing and impoverished countries are those countries that are most damaged by environmental degradation and by the use of expensive polluting energy sources. The UNDP's goal of ensuring environmental sustainability concentrates on effective water governance, access to sustainable energy services, sustainable land management targeting desertification and land degradation, the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, and national/sectoral policies controlling emissions of ozone-depleting substances (ODSs) and persistent organic pollutant (POP) emissions. The UNDP seeks to accomplish these objectives by linking its developing country client states with environmentally sensitive development projects that produce long-term jobs. The UNDP also helps these same countries develop and adopt policies that encourage and sustain these projects and assists in developing other governmental policies and action plans that might positively affect environmental sustainability. The UNDP also helps these countries develop the capacity to manage their environment, energy resource use, and sustainability while reducing poverty, sustaining their advancing development, and integrating the local communities and women into this management.

The UNDP promotes the effective use of the client state's water resources by developing policies and programs integrating the sustainable use of marine, coastal, and freshwater resources; adequate and accessible clean water sources; and the sanitation services necessary to sustain and improve these water resources. The UNDP supports these integrated water resources management programs by initiating and then requiring transboundary waters management within a water governance framework uniting local, national, and regional governmental entities.

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