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Millennium Development Goals

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ImageThe 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.

The MDGs are about people, about making sure that: 

  • Everyone has enough food to eat 
  • All children can attend and finish primary school 
  • Women enjoy the same opportunities and respect that men do 
  • More children under the age of five grow up healthy and strong 
  • Fewer and fewer mothers die during child birth 
  • The number of people contracting devastating diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria is continually reduced 
  • We leave a strong and healthy environment for our children and reverse the damage done 
  • The global community unites and works together to make the world more equitable, fair and just

The MDG story: A Roadmap to development

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, 189 Member States adopted the Millennium Declaration and pledged to reach the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. This represented an unprecedented consensus by world leaders on the major global challenges of the 21st century as well as a common commitment to meet these challenges.

The Declaration and MDGs thus provide a road map and vision of a world free from poverty and hunger, with universal education, better health, environmental sustainability, freedom, justice and equality for all.

MDG1: 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

MDG2: Achieve universal primary education
  • Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling

MDG3: Promote gender equality and empower women
  • Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015

MDG4: Reduce child mortality
  • Reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the mortality rate among children under five

MDG5: Improve maternal health
  • Reduce by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio

MDG6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
  • Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015 
  • Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases by 2015

MDG7: Ensure environmental sustainability 
  • Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse the loss of environment resources
  • Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015
  • Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020

MDG8: Develop a global partnership for development
  • Develop further an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory. This 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