Why the millennium goals matter: printer friendly version

Why the millennium goals matter: printer friendly version: "What is perhaps even more important is that the goals have caught the imagination of ordinary citizens around the globe and have been embraced as tangible expressions of the concerns of ordinary people across the developing world: reducing child and maternal mortality, ensuring that every girl and boy gets a basic education, securing access to clean water and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other infectious yet preventable diseases.

The UN Development Program's annual Human Development Report, sent to world leaders last week, details the sobering consequences of inaction on these goals, including the avoidable deaths of 40 million children, and 400 million more people living in extreme poverty than would be the case if the goals were met. Our data also show that under current trends, many of the poorest countries - mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, but also in the former Soviet Union - will slip further away from these goals without swift and substantial improvement in aid levels, trade policies and national governance.

But projections are not destiny: These trends can be reversed. And that is why an explicit endorsement of the MDGs at the 2005 World Summit is so important.


The MDGs can make the next 10 years the decade in which we finally turn the corner on extreme poverty. For this to succeed we need more than rhetoric. The goals stipulate with needed precision what it is we are setting out to do, and allow us to chart progress toward these interlocking aims, year after year, country by country, to ensure that these promises are kept.

Those promises include efforts at comprehensive reform within developing nations, which are the indispensable other side of the grand global bargain that was agreed in principle at the 2000 summit. We also need to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of people around the world as the driving force of sustainable gro"