The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

The eight MDGs:

Goal 1: End extreme poverty and hunger

UN Targets:

  • Halve the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day
  • Halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger worldwide

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education

UN Target:

  • Ensure that children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling

Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women

UN Target:

  • Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015

Goal 4: Reduce child mortality

UN Target:

  • Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate

Goal 5: Improve maternal health

UN Target:

  • Reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio

Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

UN Target:

  • Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major disease.

Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability

UN Target:

  • Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the 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

Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development

UN Targets:

  • Develop a global partnership for development
  • Develop further an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory and that includes a commitment to good governance, development and poverty reduction, both 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 (HIPCs), 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

Read more about Bóthar and the Millennium Development Goals

In September 2000, world leaders agreed a set of goals for the international community, to bring about a world in which sustaining development and eliminating poverty would have the highest priority.

These goals were based on agreements and resolutions of world conferences organised by the United Nations in the 1990s. The goals are commonly accepted as a framework for measuring "development" progress.

The goals establish yardsticks for measuring results, for developing countries and rich countries alike. The first seven goals are mutually reinforcing and are directed at reducing poverty in all its forms. The eighth goal is about the means to achieve the first seven.

By the year 2015, all 191 UN member countries have pledged to achieve these goals.

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