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Reaching the 2015 goals would be an enormous achievement – improving the well-being and security of many millions of the world's poorest people. If governments north and south deliver on their promises to deliver on aid and prioritise the needs of the billion people living on less than US$1 a day, the proportion of the world's population living in poverty can be halved within a decade. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are highly significant in terms of what they represent for international consensus on and commitment to addressing extreme poverty and basic human rights. And reaching the goals will mean an awful lot to some people in some countries. But the goals are not just targets. They are intended to provide a guide and framework for the longer term objective of achieving a world without poverty. All this raises some important questions:
Read more in Hitting the target, missing the point (PDF) a discussion paper prepared for the Making Development Work for the Poorest conference. |
"If
policies were programmes and promises were dollars [we] could report great
progress on the road to eradicating global poverty."
Judith Randel and Tony German,
Reality
of Aid 1998/1999
Hitting the target, missing the point
Read article (PDF) from the Making Development Work for the Poorest seminar
| What are the prospects for meeting the targets? |
Unfortunately, while some significant progress is being made towards meeting some of the targets in some countries, in many cases progress is patchy, too slow or non-existent.
There is clear evidence that many countries, communities and individuals will be left untouched. Progress has been far from uniform:
- there are huge inconsistencies in terms of progress across and within recipient countries
- some of the MDGs are making more rapid progress than others
- not all donor countries are on track to meet their pledged commitments.
| Looking beyond 2015 |
At the same time as efforts to achieve the MDGs are intensified, it is vital that plans are made not just to halve poverty by 2015 – but to eliminate it within a generation.
Even if the goals are achieved in full, nearly a billion people will still be living in poverty in 2015. More ...
| A bit of background to development targets |
International development targets (IDTs) are a series of poverty reduction targets that were formulated at a series of UN conferences during the 1990s.
At the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995, world leaders made a series of commitments – notably to the goal of eradicating absolute poverty. (See p2 of Chronic Poverty Update, July 2005.)
Many of these commitments were enshrined in Shaping the 21st Century: the Contribution of Development Cooperation (S21C) – a strategy adopted by OECD donors in 1996. (External link to a PDF on the OECD site.)
At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders adopted the UN Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound targets, with a deadline of 2015, that have become known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The 0.7% target – first pledged 35 years ago in a 1970 General Assembly Resolution – is a key test of the commitment made by world leaders in 1995 to eliminate poverty.