speedy summary

What are the Millennium Development Goals?

In the year 2000 the governments of the world came together and agreed eight goals to help end poverty. The Millennium Development Goals cover crucial areas such as access to education and healthcare, reduction in maternal mortality and access to food. Governments promised to achieve most of these goals by 2015 and each goal has a number of specific targets so it is possible to measure their success. For example one of the targets for the first goal is to halve the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day. Read more

Why are they important?

Today, there are more than 850 million people living in hunger, and more than 1 billion people living on less than one dollar per day. The Millennium Development Goals are the first major attempt by all of the world’s governments to tackle some of the underlying reasons that people live in extreme poverty.
All of these goals are connected, and all impact on levels of poverty. If you can’t drink clean water you get sick. Then you can’t earn enough to buy medicine, so you can’t get better. If you don’t have education it’s very hard to get a job, or to have any influence on changing things.

But if governments have made these promises,
what’s the problem?

Thanks to people pressure, there has been some progress since 2000. Where commitments to meet the MDGs have been acted upon, millions of people are living with new hope. Many more children are in school. More people are receiving treatment for HIV and AIDS. Millions of mosquito nets have been distributed, causing malaria infection rates to plummet. But there is no room for complacency. Many governments are failing to keep their promises, and even giving the impression of giving more money in aid than they actually are. With a problem this big, we can’t afford to sit back and hope that they’ll do the right thing. We must keep the pressure up.

So what can I do?

Over the next six months there are a series of important meetings which are key steps on the way to 2015. With only seven years to go to meet these vital goals, it is critical that these meetings are successful if the MDGs are to be met.

As it stands, it looks like many governments are going to fail to meet their commitments on key issues, and these meetings may be just for show.

This global online action gives people around the world the chance to tell their government that they must keep their promises and meet the Millennium Development Goals.