The Millennium Development Goals

In 2000, leaders from 189 nations signed on to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight ambitious targets designed to significantly reduce global poverty and disease by 2015. By setting time-bound, measurable targets for achieving results in areas like child and maternal health, education and access to water and sanitation, they injected new momentum into the fight against global poverty.

Achieving these important development goals depends on a partnership between developing countries and donor governments. Developing countries must lead the way by prioritizing poverty reduction, demonstrating effective governance and working with civil society to develop transparent and accountable plans to achieve the goals. Developed countries also have a key role to play. They signed on to support the efforts of developing countries by agreeing to goal eight, which calls for a global partnership to achieve the poverty reduction targets.

Since 2000, tangible results prove that dramatic progress is possible when developing countries and donor governments fulfill their ends of the bargain: debt cancellation has saved African countries $93 billion, which along with development assistance for education helped send an additional 34 million more African children to school for the first time between 1999 and 2006, increased global resources for health have helped almost three million HIV-positive people receive life-saving antiretroviral medicine and delivered 70 million bed nets to protect families from malaria.

Despite these successes, much more needs to be done to ensure that MDGs are met by 2015, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, which is the region farthest off-track from reaching the goals. Through the MDGs, the world has pledged to make progress in the following areas:

1.    Poverty and Hunger: Around the world, 1.4 billion people are living in extreme poverty (earning less than $1.25 a day) and nearly one in seven people goes to bed hungry every night.

• Target 1: Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day
• Target 2: Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people
• Target 3: Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger

2.    Education: Expanded access to education generates widespread returns in areas like health and economic growth, yet 75 million children are currently out of school across the world.

• Target 1: Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling

3.    Gender Equality: Around the world, women are bearing the brunt of extreme poverty and disease. Women work longer hours earning less money, have fewer educational and political opportunities and are more vulnerable to failures of weak health systems and diseases like HIV/AIDS than their male counterparts.

• Target 1: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015

4.    Child Health: Every year, 9.2 million children die before their fifth birthday, nearly all of them from preventable or treatable diseases like diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria and measles.

• Target 1: Reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate

5.    Maternal Health: Every year, more than half a million mothers die from complications during child birth and tens of millions more suffer from pregnancy related illnesses and injuries.

• Target 1: Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio
• Target 2: Achieve universal access to reproductive health

6.    HIV/AIDS, Malaria & Other Diseases: Although HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria are preventable and treatable, they are three of the world's most devastating diseases. Every day, more than 12,500 people die from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, nearly two-thirds of whom are living in sub-Saharan Africa.

• Target 1: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS
• Target 2: Achieve, by 2010, universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it
• Target 3: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases

7.    Environmental Stability: Across the world, 884 million people do not have access to clean water and 2.5 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation, deficits that are projected to widen with emerging threats such as climate change and population growth.

• Target 1: Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources
• Target 2: Reduce biodiversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss
• Target 3: Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation
• Target 4: By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers

8.    Develop a Global Partnership for Development: Success in achieving the first seven goals requires a new compact of global cooperation through which developing countries and donor governments prioritize development and build a sustainable and accountable system to support it. Wealthy countries have made ambitious commitments in the past few years, and while some countries have taken great strides to follow through, many commitments have yet to be fulfilled.

• Target 1: Address the special needs of least developed countries, landlocked countries and small island developing states
• Target 2: Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system
• Target 3: Deal comprehensively with developing countries' debt
• Target 4: In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries
• Target 5: In cooperation with the private sector, make available benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications

Midway to 2015, world leaders face an historic opportunity to renew the fight against extreme poverty by reaffirming their commitment to development and leveraging new resources to achieve their agreed-upon goals. Along with leaders, campaigns and citizens across the world, ONE is working to mobilize broad-based support for achieving the MDGs and holding world leaders to account for the targets and commitments they set to reach them.