The Millennium Development Goals: Ambitious Solution to a Massive Problem

The world is an unequal place.  

The first decade of the new millennium was categorized by optimistic observations that the world “is flat”, or at the very least, rapidly becoming that way.  People, goods and ideas flow rapidly across the world, surmounting geography, language and cultural differences and time constraints all through the miracles of an ever expanding explosion of technology. But though the average American may be many times more likely than her parents or grandparents to travel the globe and consume products from every corner of it on a daily basis, this vision rings hollow for millions of the world’s inhabitants. For them the flaw, to quote E.E. Schattsneider, as political scientist of a bygone era describing the phenomenon of pluralism (but applying equally to globalization), "is that the heavenly chorus signs with a strong upper-class accent."  For most of the world’s population, and particularly those who have been living in the bottom billion, the benefits of globalization have been elusive, to say the least.  In fact, for some the world has been moving backwords, with standards of living dropping, and morbidity and mortality -- sometimes fueled by the new scourge of HIV/AIDS – increasing, and the negative externalities of other parts of the world’s affluence – from global climate change to environmental degradation caused by resource extraction and electronics and chemical dumping – actually increasing.

What is to be done?  This book looks at the world’s most recent response to this pressing question. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is an eight point blueprint for addressing global poverty.  The eight goals are:

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education

Goal 3: Promote gender equity and empower women

Goal 4: Reduce child mortality

Goal 5: Improve maternal health

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

Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability

Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development

Each of the goals has at least one target that specifies what is to be done to meet the goal, and a set of indicators to show how this will be measured, with 22 targets and 43 indicators (double-check this) in all.  For example, the first target of Goal One is to “halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than a dollar a day.”  This target will in turn be measured by three indicators: the proportion of population below $1 per day; a measure called the poverty gap ratio; and the share of consumption that is done by the poorest 20% of a nation’s population.

On this site readers will find a discussion of each of the eight goals.  Each of these discussions has been structured to address the following topics: historical developments that led to the adoption of the goal within the MDGs; a target-by-target current status of the goal; a discussion of successes and challenges of the goal; and a special feature that applies the issue addressed by the goal to the United States.  In addition, we have included four country case studies on the site to help illustrate some of the ways that the geographical position and features, history, human population and social features of a country may affect its successes and failures in achieving the MDGs.