Millennium Development Goals

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed to at the September 2000 UN Millennium Summit consist of eighteen targets and forty-eight progress indicators that identify a number of development priorities dedicated to vastly improving the quality of life for millions of the world's poorest. These are subject to annual progress reports, and 2015 has been set as the final assessment year. The MDGs are

• 1.
  to reduce by fifty percent the number of the world's population currently living on less than $1 per day, and to reduce by the same amount the number of people suffering from hunger;
• 2.
  to ensure that all children complete primary schooling;
• 3.
  to promote gender equality by eliminating disparities at all levels of education;
• 4.
  to reduce by two-thirds child mortality among children under five;
• 5.
  to improve maternal mortality health;
• 6.
  to effectively combat a number of the world's major diseases, such as AIDS, malaria, and measles by improving access to affordable drugs;
• 7.
  to ensure protection of the environment by placing sustainability at the top of development programs, reducing by fifty percent the number of people currently without access to safe drinking water and improving the quality of life for the inhabitants of the world's worst slum areas;
• 8.
  to establish and consolidate a global development partnership; a transparent, rule-based global and multilateral economic system that promotes principles of good governance and poverty reduction addressing the particular problems faced by lessdeveloped countries (LDCs) and heavily indebted countries (HICs), including more development assistance, debt relief or cancellation, technology transfer, and market access.

The MDGs have established themselves as important benchmarks for UN development programs as well as for other global governance institutions, and donor and recipient states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are using the MDGs as reference points in their own poverty reduction strategies. A number of key international institutions concerned with development, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, contributed expert advice to the design of the MDGs and are involved in formulating strategies aimed at reaching the targets and assessing progress toward them, and [Page 570]the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) plans to integrate the MDGs systematically into the Development Assistance Committee (the principal body through which the OECD deals with issues related to cooperation with developing countries).

It is widely believed that the MDGs significantly contribute to the fight against global poverty. Acknowledging collective responsibility for formulating development strategies and meeting explicit quantitative targets, the MDGs are claimed to represent a significant commitment by all countries and major international private and public institutions to the millions who have been marginalized from global economic growth and prosperity in recent years. In setting these targets, politicians at the highest level have identified a set of harmonized and integrated strategies geared toward securing outcomes that can be precisely monitored by National Millennium Goals Reports (in addition to standard UN General Assembly reports and conferences) and tracked by a plethora of NGOs, and against which these politicians can therefore be held accountable.

Yet, the MDGs have elicited a number of criticisms. First, some of the targets are set at such a low level they are easily achieved and make little progress toward addressing global poverty. For example, there is concern that, despite the fact that overseas development assistance (ODA) to the least developed countries fell significantly during the 1990s, funds promised for assistance will not use new money but, rather, will take funds from current aid budgets, re-jigging existing development finances rather than providing substantive new amounts. On the other hand, there are clearly significant obstacles in the way of realizing some of the targets, such as ensuring access to richer country markets in agricultural produce or providing sustainable debt relief.

...