The Millennium Development Goals
What Are They
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 all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions. They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.
- 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
- Develop a global partnership for development
More about The Millennium Development Goals
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.
Achieve universal primary education
-Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling.
Promote gender equality and empower women
-Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015.
Reduce child mortality
-Reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five.
Improve maternal health
-Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio.
Combat HIV/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.
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.
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 decentand 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.
