The Origins of the MDG's 

Katie Saint Raymond and Trish Siplon

Where did the Millennium Development Goals come from?  The short answer is the Millennium Summit, a meeting held in September 2000.  But this tells us only the date on which the countries of the world signed onto the document which would be translated (with some notable changes in the process) into the MDGs. The longer answer requires a longer time frame, and at least a cursory discussion of some of the organizational players who would take up prominent roles in the lead-up to the MDGs.

Fifty Years of Development Rhetoric Yield Limited Results

            The pledge of 189 countries to try to achieve the MDGs was certainly not the first time the UN and other political leaders have made promises to the world. As early as Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous Four Freedoms Speech in1941, politicians have declared it their moral duty to "look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms...the freedom of speech and expression...of every person to worship God in his own way...the freedom from want, or economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peace time life for its inhabitants...and freedom from fear...anywhere in the world" (Roosevelt 1941). Roosevelt's 1941 promise was the first time in history anyone had declared a vision of a world where human rights existed and thrived in every country "everywhere in the world."

            In 1948, another major declaration would be made yet again. The still young General Assembly of the United Nations sat down and unanimously passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the most important historical documents of the 20th century. For the first time in history, it laid out specific rights all humans are entitled to and that every country should work to provide. The forty-eight countries that were in session committed that year to achieving these universal rights. And for the next forty years, the UN would continue holding sessions and working towards their goals. The United States and other industrialized countries would continue to aid other developing countries and help those in need as best as they could. Yet internationally, many countries were still suffering. Promises may have been made, but no solid plans that strove to root out the cause and discontinue the problem. That is, until the Millennium Development Goals were established.

             The MDGs contained not only the most ambitious promise ever made to the world, but the first promise from the UN to the world that was clearly defined and specific in what leaders wanted to achieve. "The Millennium Declaration articulated an overarching policy framework for the system's organizations. Because they are concrete, quantified, and time-bound, the MDGs have demonstrated their usefulness as tools for the mobilization of the system” (Weiss 2007, 574). This was a promise backed with research, data and facts showing details about the problems the UN is facing and the solutions they have come up for them.

The first more specific goal to be tackled was world hunger. The stage was set in 1960, when a large group of new member countries in history, 17 in all, joined the United Nations as newly independent states grappling with the basic needs of their citizenry.  With the development of issue of hunger staunchly in the forefront, the UN launched the “Freedom from Hunger” campaign in July and followed it in October with a directive from the General Assembly (resolution 1714) to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to find ways to get surplus food to the least developed countries. In December the World Food Programme was established as a three year program funded by $100 million in voluntary donations and an annual pledging conference was established for continuing support (Jackson 2007, 7).

Broadening out the initial hunger focus, the UN declared the 1960s as the “Development Decade” and the developing countries organized their own Conference on the Problems of Economic Development in Egypt in July, 1962 which produced the Cairo Declaration on Development to offer a developing country perspective on approaches to economic and social development.  Despite this and related campaigns and conferences, the decade was seen as largely a failure and so in October 1970, a Second United Nations Development Decade was declared.  At the same time resolution 2626 was passed, this time creating an International Development Strategy to meet the goal.  This was the source of the now-famous (and still never achieved) commitment of the developed countries to provide official development assistance (ODA) at a minimum level of 0.7 per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) by the middle of the 1970s (Jackson 2007, 8).

However, the early 1970s also saw a major economic crisis, initially set off in 1971 by the collapse of the gold standard upon which major currencies were based, and then the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the subsequent oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).  In response to the deterioration of the global economy and its impacts on the millions already suffering in developing countries, the UN General Assembly convened a World Food Conference in 1974 and adopted a Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition, and in December of the same year, adopted the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States (Jackson 2007, 8-9). Another notable development within the 1970s was the International Conference on Primary Health Care hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), Kazakhstan which produced the Alma Ata Declaration which pronounced health a fundamental human right.

When the seventies were deemed yet another failure in terms of forward movement on the International Development Strategy, a Third United Nations Development Decade was declared to span 1981-1990.  This one set out targets to be achieved by 1990 in terms of, among other things, growth, mortality and poverty reduction and developing country aid.  But in furtherance of the trend, these were not reached, and in fact the 1980s were marked primarily by the pursuit of policies driven by the so-called “Washington Consensus”, “a set of views about effective development strategies that have come to be associated with the Washington-based institutions: the IMF, the World Bank and the U.S.  Treasury” (Serra Spiegel and Stiglitz 2008, 3).  The term “Washington Consensus,” often synonymous with “neoliberal policies,” was coined by John Williamson in a 1989 report of ten reforms Williamson believed all Washington policy makers agreed on. Williamson claimed that with a free market, discipline in country’s fiscal spending, tax reform, liberalization and privatization of trade, a country would prosper economically and develop even further. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank quickly pounced on these policies, offering economic freedom and to third world countries specifically in Latin America (Stone, 2013).  Countries that needed external funding were suddenly offered a way out through these new reforms known as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). Countries would sign on to new policies and reforms without realizing what exactly they were getting into. As the end of the 1980’s grew closer, these structural adjustment policies were still not bringing the results they wanted. The neoliberal policies were focusing too much on economic increase and overall wealth, not on other things such as living standards and family dynamics. They also did not think about sustaining manageable lifestyles for the average working family, and instead focused solely on stimulating the economy (Stiglitz 2006, 17). The policies of the Washington Consensus brought a sharp decline in economic growth and health, and ultimately devastated many countries in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

Countries like Argentina that signed on to neoliberal policies found themselves in deeper debt with a higher poverty line. In 1980, before Argentina became involved with the IMF or the World Bank, only 7% of their country was considered poor. By 1999, an astounding 37% of the country was considered below the poverty line (Jorge 2013).

      

While IMF and the World Bank were so ready and accepting of SAP’s, harsh criticism from the United Nation Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other organizations ensured the public’s lack of support on these types of policies. UNICEF and other non-governmental organizations (NGO's) used the power of photography to gain the public's trust. While the World Bank and IMF may have been the masterminds behind the policies being implemented, they did not have the advantage of promoting a devastating photograph of a malnourished child staring blankly back at the camera. Advertising as a form of pushing the public's hearts into falling in love with the starving children in the world was a major tactic for UNICEF. In fact, in 1990 when a team from UNICEF run the World Children's Summit, the same tactics are used to get policy makers onto their side.

            In 1987, UNICEF published the report Adjustment with a Human Face, attacking the policies and the IMF and World Bank’s lack of responsibility in the devastation of the many countries wrapped up in SAPs (World Health Organization 2013). The adjustments to these policies recommended in this report were taken into consideration by the early 90's, thanks to the push by Jim Grant, leader of the UNICEF organization.

The economic hardships created by Washington consensus-driven structural adjustment and other belt-tightening policies were compounded in the 1990s by another global political development – the end of the Cold War.  The collapse of the Soviet Union ended that country’s role as a major international donor at the same time that it destroyed much of the United States’ incentive for donating as well.  With lessened competition for client states, wealthy countries could and did cut their foreign aid budgets and focus on domestic issues.  The United States, for instance, saw its foreign aid budget plummet to a new low of 0.09 percent of GDP in 1997 (MacArthur 2013).

The Nineties: Rise of the Summit

By 1990, it was clear the policy makers had lost sight of the bigger picture. They were so focused on stimulating the economy that they forgot their motivation was to alleviate human suffering and allow fellow human beings access to the rights they were born with. In 1990 2 major reports were published, signifying a new era of change. The release of 1990 World Bank World Development Report focused on the past few years’ attempts on the eradication of poverty from the world through economic development, and how they can eradicate poverty by the new millennium. They acknowledged that the 1980’s was not successful for the poorest countries in the world, particularly in the Sub-Saharan African and Latin American families living on less than $370 a year, and the “burden of poverty” was heaviest on these two regions. Though the Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America countries only made up about 41% of the world, they accounted for 62.5% of the poorest of the poor (World Bank 1990, 2). Through new policies and providing basic services to the poor--nutrition, health care, primary education--poverty had potential to be greatly reduced. This report stressed a greater need for aid from wealthier countries to help relieve their developing neighbors across the world (World Bank 1990, 4).

          

However, its focus on developing policies and not researching how these policies will translate to better living standards was highly criticized. Some critics pointed out the World Bank's motives were still unclear. Their report may have stressed better policies to relieve the debts of the poor, but many of their ideas still seemed to center around Neoliberal policies (Cammack 2). As Paul Cammack points out, "While the [World Bank's] commitment to sustainable debt and poverty reduction is real, these are only secondary objectives" (Cammack,2). The main objective is reforming developing countries' governments "in order to generalize and facilitate capitalist accumulation on a global scale" (Cammack,3). With this development of a government and its capital gains, the World Bank would hope poverty reduction comes along as well. But reducing the number of underprivileged humans in the world has never been the World Bank's specific focus. With this in mind, NGO's and other organizations never felt like they were eye to eye with the World Bank and therefore never completely developed a trust for them. It would take another document to add a deeper level of focus on poverty reduction: the Human Development Report. 

            The next major report to be published was the first ever United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s 1990 Human Development Report, which helped to “put people back at the center of the development process in terms of economic debate, policy and advocacy” (hdr.undp.org 1990). This report worked to revamp the issue of poverty and establish a goal with a set time for completion, stressing policy makers needed to have a deadline, or an end, as they created a means to eradicating poverty. They questioned the idea of economic growth and how it transforms into human development and wellbeing, serving as a reminder that the ultimate goal is better lives for more people. With an in depth analysis of human development over the past 30 years, this report looked at how people lived their lives and what needed to be changed. This report provided the answers to questions the World Bank’s World Development Report never answered, demonstrating that these global issues on poverty are a much bigger problem than simply GNP growth and a measure of wealth and expenditure:

            “Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices. The most critical of these wide-ranging choices are to live a long and healthy life, to be educated and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living. Additional choices include political freedom, guaranteed human rights and personal self-respect” (1990 HDR Overview, 1).

            On top of these two reports being published, a new wave of summits and conferences sprung up. In 1990, four conferences alone were held, each delivering a new issue or topic of focus to the leaders of the world. One was the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Conference on the Least Developed Countries, and the second was the conference on Drug Problems (Hulme 2009, 9).

            Next the World Conference on Education for All was held on March 5-9. With over 155 countries represented, this conference in Jomtien, Thailand agreed to make universal primary education available to every child across the globe and ultimately reduce illiteracy before the end of the decade. They reaffirmed the established belief that education is a right for everyone and living in poverty is no reason to be denied this right (Report 1990, 2). Though this conference was full of great promises, no plan of action to create access to this right on a global scale was ever established.

            It was the UN’s 1990 World Summit for Children that created an even bigger splash. This conference focused on the overall wellbeing and development of children. From September 29-30 in the United Nation’s New York City headquarters, dozens of countries came together to  “discuss and prepare for action on the great opportunities for protecting today’s children- and tomorrow’s world” (Jim Grant 1988). With the help of UNICEF’s Executive Director Jim Grant, the UN came up with a plan for a discussion on the future of the world’s children. The idea of a world meeting had been nagging Grant for a little over two years. It took time to convince the UN to host this conference, and even more time deliberating over what actual events would transpire. Grant and his workers were not sure if such a summit would even be taken seriously. Years later, economist Richard Jolly—a colleague of Grant’s—would recount the tale of Jim forging a bet on how many heads of state would actually turn up. “Of the 35 persons or so who put down their dollar, Jim’s own estimate was highest at 53. Even this was 18 below the number of heads of state who actually arrived: 71” (Jolly, 56). Not even Grant could imagine how big an impact this summit would become.

            UNICEF and the UN saw this summit as an opportunity to write up a proposal and declaration, and to have heads of state commit together to make children the focus of future economic policies and solve the issue of poverty within children. Grant wanted to make sure each country that participated would be held accountable for their actions and would continue to work on developing opportunities and resources for children. He saw an opportunity to write a "Declaration and Plan of Action," and to get countries to make "commitments to goals and a plan of action that would extend the success of immunization and the Child Survival and Development Revolution" (Jolly, Jim Grant, 56).

            The actual planning took up quite a bit of time. Documents showed UNICEF's careful consideration of every aspect of the summit, including the importance of bringing children representing each country of the world in. Grant wanted the government officials to have a face to match these ideas to, to see their own child dressed in traditional clothing from their country, ready to represent (Brennan 1990). When the last few days of September rolled around, the conference ensued. Children dressed in their own countries' clothing, waving their flag welcomed officials to the conference. The same children also recited the Declaration at the end of the weekend. What made the 1990 World Children's Summit stand out was its enforcement of the promises and declarations all the countries agreed on. After the summit, UNICEF and Jim Grant worked hard to establish a National Plan of Action (NPA) for each country. "Armed with a colour-coded chart for each country, Jim toured the world, visiting as many heads of state as he could see, to argue the case for accelerated action" (Jolly, 57). No other summit had produced such profound results due to the conferences and promises made. For the first time, countries were sticking to their plans, or at least made an effort to. Promises are easy to make. Actually implementing them are not. With the help of UNICEF, the UN created a vision that over 150 countries- both industrialized and developing-committed to. Jim Grant showed officials how powerful a conference could actually be with the right implementation.

            With four major summits starting out the nineties, a fifth important summit did not come until two years later. The 1992 Conference on Environment and Development  (UNCED) was held in Rio de Janeiro. Widely known as the "Earth Summit" or "Rio Summit," from June 3-14 this conference attracted representatives from 179 countries, including 116 heads of state  (Rosenbaum, 346). The importance of the Earth Summit was its originality. Though there had been a conference held on environmental issues twenty years prior, that conference focused on developing economic policy and gained little attention. No other conference that focused solely on environmental issues had been successfully held until this point in 1992. The Earth Summit would become the jumping point for goal 7 of the MDG's. Up until now thoughts about the environment and how that affects our future had never been spoken aloud. Suddenly, the media, public and world had its head turned towards Rio, watching as countries came together to debate the issues of the environment and its policies. Heads of NGO's were invited to come speak and debate with heads of state, providing an opportunity for discussion and to develop ideas. The UN and other officials focused on gaining as much support and acceptance of environmental issues as possible, and for countries to finally see the truth about the planet's status.

            All countries agreed right away that changes needed to be made. However, the 179 countries could not agree on funding. It was easy for them to commit to agreeing that the world's policies on environment needed to change. It was not easy for industrialized countries to agree to increase their spending on economic policy. "In the end, the UNCED negotiations came down to a matter of money...The tensions between rich and poor countries and the financial conflicts that underlie them were at the heart of every major negotiation" (Meakin, 1992). The heads of the UNCED were introducing and pushing plans to increase foreign aid in industrialized countries by as little as .7 percent. Though some countries agreed to increase their yearly foreign aid towards developing countries' environmental issues,m many were extremely reluctant to give in. Most notorious in their reluctance was the U.S. America's behavior towards the Rio Summit. Though they participated in the Summit, it was noted from the beginning that the U.S. had no policy on their attitude towards the environment, nor did they seem interested. Before the conference even began, they submitted a written statement to the General Assembly acknowledging the Rio Declaration's intentions but affirming that these policies will not change their beliefs on some of the policies proposed in the Declaration:

          "The United States does not, by joining consensus on the Rio Declaration, change its long-standing opposition to the so-called 'right to development.' Development is not a right. On the contrary, development is a goal we all hold, which depends for its realization in large part on the promotion and protection of the human rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights" (United States Rio Declaration, Principle 3).

             They refused to make any major compromises, let alone spend any extra money on foreign aid. They even opted out of signing the Biodiversity Convention, a treaty written up for the Rio Summit (Vig, 316). The U.S.'s reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was their way of demonstrating they do not want to commit to any idea that does not reflect the rights they'd originally established 45 years previously. The idea of development as a human right is a major reason the U.S. was not as committed to the U.N.'s own agendas in the 1990's. In May of 1994 the U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali firmly stated the development is a human right and "is the most secure basis for peace" (Boutros-Ghali, 1994, 17).

            The countries signed the Earth Summit did not make any major changes. Many officials were disappointed. Said Secretary-General of the UN Maurice Strong as the conference was ending, "We got an agreement, but without commitment" (Pearce, 1992). Yet their biggest success lay in their gain in attention and popularity, making more citizens across the world aware of environmental issues. One tactic they used was breaking out of the standard conference meeting model and creating activities and preparations before and after the summit to gain more media attention. "The Rio process included a series of related events, unparalleled in scope and sponsored by civic-based entities that together were referred to as the Global Forum" (Weiss, 2009, 66). While officials met inside at the Riocentro, a large convention center in Rio, NGO's flocked together to create festivities for the public to participate in. Over 7,500 organizations participated in the Global Forum (Gutfeld, 1992), allowing for the public to gain more awareness about the environment and the issues the world was facing.

             From 1992 on, environmental issues have been a major subject on the table. Campaigns and movements have been made to increase awareness about growing environmental issues. The Earth Summit succeeded by gaining awareness and placing environmental issues on the table for officials to see. In 2000, when planning for the Millennium Development goals, environmental issues would make it on the list and eventually evolve into Target 7.

             Ending the year 1992 was the International Conference on Food  Nutrition (ICF). Held in Rome in mid-December, This conference worked to establish why the amount of food production and consumption in industrialized countries was increasing, while millions of starving families in developing countries were still going hungry.  Though the ICF worked to make many promises and dedications, they hardly took any real action (Hulme, 2009, p. 10). The 159 countries and 144 NGO's represented wrote up and signed the World Declaration and Plan of Action for Nutrition, claiming that "hunger and malnutrition are unacceptable in a world that has both the knowledge and the resources to end this human catastrophe," and that access to clean food and water "is a right of each individual" (World Declaration on Hunger, 1). Their impact on the MDGs was re-establishing that hunger and nutrition are major consequences of extreme poverty. Families living on less than a dollar a day are certainly not eating the proper, safe nutrition they deserve. The first target on the MDGs is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. One of the specific targets established in the Declaration on Hunger was to cut the number of hungry families in half. This target would also become a specific goal in Target 1 of the MDGs. They also referred to the 1990 World Children's Summit and recommitted to the goals established for children's hunger (World Declaration on Hunger, 41). Their acknowledgement of previous summits reflects the beginning of collaboration and interaction between summits and conferences. Though different groups and organizations had separate goals and focuses, many issues tend to overlap one another.

             The ICF's documents also included a section women's rights, stressing that their right to adequate nutrition is just as crucial as a man's right. Like the Earth Summit, this conference made women's rights an issue they wanted to address (World Declaration on Hunger, 3) and brought it forward to the table in their conference.

             The World Conference on Human Rights of 1993 made a huge impact in the spread of human rights awareness as a whole. Like the 1990 UNDP Human Development Report, this conference put the idea of human back into economic policies. It reminded UN members what they were striving to achieve, and of the bigger picture at hand. Over 7,000 participants  came together in Vienna for a two-week conference that ultimately allowed 171 States to create and sign the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (ohchr.org). This declaration redefined the UN's goals and framework they'd developed back in 1948 to fit the worlds' current needs in 1993, and reminded readers that they are there to "affirming that all human rights derive from the dignity and worth inherent in the human person, and that the human person is the central subject of human rights and fundamental freedoms" (U.N. General Assembly). The declaration states that it is every country's duty and responsibility to the world to fulfill their obligations towards every human being living in their state, urging them to continue to fight for universal human rights.

            This conference also recognized for the first time different organizations and groups fighting for equal rights. Lesbian and gay organizations were invited and acknowledged at the World Conference, making it the first time the UN invited such minorities to an event (Poole, 1999, 269-270).

            The Vienna conference also directly addressed women's human rights after many protests and petitions from various NGO's dedicated to women's equality and gender violence. Together, over 950 organizations dedicated to various types of women's violence created the Global Campaign for Women's Human Rights. This campaign worked to gain over half a million women's signatures in order to get the Vienna Conference to place their problems on the agenda. Vienna brought women's rights to the table by specifically addressing women's right as a human rights issue, thus allowing for the first time the U.N. to directly acknowledge women's violence in a U.N. sponsored conference (Iriye, 2012, 148-150): "The equal status and the human rights of women should be intergrated into the mainstream of United Nations system-wide activity" (Vienna Declaration, 13). The inclusion of women's rights in the World Conference on Human Rights would pave the way for the success of the Fourth World Conference on Women of September 1995. This would also be crucial to the inclusion of women's rights in the MDG's a few years later.

             Though the Vienna Conference was successful in revamping the issue of human rights, its declaration and goals were extremely scattered. It had fire and passion, but no specific focus on one subject. Too many NGO's, individuals and other organizations were pushing for their cause to be addressed on the declaration that no obvious or focused plan of action was written out or executed. The General Assembly of the UN considered the Declaration to be a new pledge to commit towards promoting and recognizing all human rights. However, it would take the planning of the MDG's to understand the  "economic and managerial concepts that underpin the MDG's- prioritizing some goals over others and accepting that achievement may take years" (Hulme, 2009, p.10).

             Another major conference happened in September of 1994. The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) hosted over 170 nations in Cairo (LA Times, 1994). Led by the famous Dr. Nafis Sadik as the Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), this conference worked to promote an understanding of the growing population and what factors policy makers can do to help slow down population growth. Previously, the U.N. has held two other conferences on Population in 1974 and 1984. But the success of the 1994 conference stemmed from Sadik herself.

             Born and raised near Calcutta in 1929, Nafis Shoaib hailed from an extremely wealthy family. Though tempted to become another submissive Indian wife and raised a large family, Nafis chose another path: Calcutta Medical School. She quickly realized how much of a disadvantage many women in the world are at, due to their lack of education. If Nafis could educate more women on concepts as simple as sanitation in a bathroom, more lives could be easily saved. She became interested in family planning and helping women prepare for their future. In the 1950's, Nafis developed a five-year family planning program at a hospital in Pakistan (Motavalli, 1999, 1) . In 1970, Nafis joined UNFPA, where she worked to promote universal women's rights and education. By 1987, her passion for promoting family planning and healthy lifestyles led her to become the first female to head a major UN agency. She was promoted to Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (Businessweek.com). Now, in 1994 she was prepared to head the ICPD. What made this conference in particular special was the inclusion of the word "Development" in the title, suggesting Sadik and her committee was prepared to create an action plan.

            The debate and discussions of human growth and population were another major factor in the development of the MDG's. In the early 1990's, Sadik predicted a world with nine billion people by the year 2050 (Motavalli,1999,1). Sadik and her team worked to spread awareness of the growing number and to propose ideas that can help slow the growth down. The ICPD was crucial in creating this awareness. At the conference, Sadik stressed the importance of education of women, believing that equality for women is the key to keeping the population lower in numbers. Claiming women's equal rights was a major key in sustaining the population made many sparks fly.

             With Sadik proposing a plan that allows women the right to choose whether or not they want to become pregnant and access to birth control, the debates in Cairo quickly became heated and turned into questions of sexual reproduction rights and health. The Catholic Church and Muslim organizations became angered by Sadik's forwardness, claiming soon she would promote abortion for women, though Sadik continuously clarified there never was any hidden agenda to universally legalize abortion (Connors, 1994, 1). These issues had never been discussed or associated with population control until 1994. Soon, the media and the rest of the world began to take notice. As Hulme writes, "The agreements [the Conference] reached, following heated debates between government officials, professionals, social activists and religious groups, would generate more backroom negotiations and deals than any other MDG term" (Hulme, 2007, 4). The ICPD also acknowledged environmental issues and its influence on populations in different countries, making a nod toward the successful Rio Summit two years prior.

            The UN also used the power of media to promote the ICPD. When the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM) came up during the conference, Sadik and her committee had no qualms about showing a taping of a FGM taking place right in the heart of Cairo itself. Despite the fact that Egypt denied such an act ever occurred in their country, CNN had it taped and broadcast for the entire world to see. The footage depicted ten-year-old Nagla Hamza, all dressed up and smiling brightly into the camera. She was at her circumcision party, where she and her family were celebrating her "right of passage." Without any sanitizing or anesthetic applied, Nagla's family held her down and snipped her clitoris off (Smolowe, 1994). This clip, shown at the ICPD to the 179 officials attending, sparked an outrage. Yet it got the UN's point across. From that point on, FGM was seen as another human rights issue. These controversial issues about women's rights needed to be brought up and discussed. The discussion would continue as the MDG's developed, and would not stop sparking controversial debate over how committed to these new goals the UN and other organizations should be (Hulme, 2007, 4). Sadik also influenced the development of the MDG's with her 20 year plans she'd presented at the conference. She had five goals said to be completed by 2015, including reduced infant mortality, reduced maternal mortality, increased access to education, increased life expectancy and increased opportunities for families visit family planning services (Sinding, 2000, 1). These plans were the beginning of the 15 year plan the Millennium Declaration and MDGs would eventually create. It was leaders like Dr. Nafis Sadik who fought for these issues to become prominent, and the media who helped invoke rage and emotion about a subject that had never been fully addressed before.        

            In 1995, the World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen brought together 117 heads of state to create a final declaration on the need for a commitment to developing human rights and creating access to rights in every state. They unanimously established the need to put people back in the center of development, and to make the improvement of poverty a primary goal in developmental rights. They stated they understood the importance of connection social issues with economic issues:

 "We are deeply convinced that economic development, social development and

environmental protection are interdependent and mutually reinforcing components

of sustainable development, which is the framework for our efforts to achieve a

higher quality of life for all people" (Copenhagen, 1995:5).

             This conference also had a declaration and a stronger plan of action, with ten commitments they agreed upon at the conference. The World Summit on Social Development stressed the need to bring major issues to the table together and understand how each issue is connected to the other. If summits and organizations continued to host their own events focusing only on their issues, no major changes would ever get done.  It was also the first time structural adjustment policies were openly acknowledged as an issue and addressed, as well. 

The Crucial Next Step: From IDGs to MDGs

One of the groups caught between the sweeping but mostly empty promises made by global conference attendees and the realities of dwindling foreign aid budgets were the government officials responsible for development aid from the wealthy countries.  Within the” rich country club”, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the high-level Development Ministers who comprised the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) commiserated while approving a new document, Development Partnership in the New Global Context that advocated for increased aid that was better and more coherently deployed and viewed as an investment rather than an expenditure (Hulme 2009, 13). The group decided to act on an EU proposal to create a Groupe de Reflexion to consider the futures roles of development aid and the DAC; and one of the tasks put to this Groupe was to sort through the agreements and declarations reached in previous UN meetings and summits to draw up a coherent list. The resulting document, “Shaping the 21^st Century: The Contribution of Development Cooperation” was 20 pages long, and boiled down to a simple list of International Development Goals (IDGs).  The list began with an overarching anti-poverty goal (cutting the number of people living in extreme poverty in half by 2015) and ended with a similar sweeping environmental goal (aiming for every country to have in place a national environmental strategy in place by 2005 that should be reversing environmental degradation by 2015). Sandwiched between these two was the social development goal.  It encompassed four elements: universal primary education by 2015; progress toward gender equity through the elimination of gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005; reduction by two-thirds and three-fourths of child and maternal mortality respectively by 2015; and access through primary health care systems to reproductive health services by 2015 (Hulme 2009, 48).

      The IDGs represented a new approach to development in several ways.  For better and for worse, they were drawn up, not by all the member nations affected, but by development professionals working for donor governments.  In accordance with the prevailing results-based management that was being adopted by OECD countries in the 1990s, the goals were a list of concrete goals with measurable targets – as opposed to a rights-based declaration that would have sought universal access to a broader array of societal services and protections. Importantly, they also had a high-profile champion who reinforced her position by enlisting the support of other powerful backers.  That champion was Claire Short, who had been appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair as Secretary of State for International Development.  Initially disappointed that she hadn’t been given her first choice to head up the transportation department, she decided to throw herself into her new position, and the IDGs became the vehicle for doing that.  It became the centerpiece of papers and programming within the Department for International Development (DFID), and of her work in promoting development as a foreign policy goal to the rest of the Labor Party and the to the general public of the UK (Hulme 2009, 24).

      Short travelled to international meetings promoting the IDGs, and in 1998 her message found resonance at the spring meeting of the IMF and World Bank in Utstein, Norway when she met three other women in charge of development for their countries:  Evelyn Herfkens (the Netherlands); Hilde Johnson (Norway); and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul (Germany). The four women, who came to be known as the “Utstein Group” bonded over both their shared politics and their passion for poverty reduction to be achieved through the pursuit of the IDGs (Hulme 2009, 25).

In the year 2000 the global focus on poverty reduction shifted back to the United Nations and the unveiling of the Millennium Declaration and the 80-page We the People document that was written in advance of the declaration. But the IDGs were excellently placed to potentially serve as the operationalization of the Declaration.  By this point the IDGs had expanded into seven goals: five focusing on social development, one on economic well-being and one on environmental sustainability. They had succinct aims and measurable targets; the passionate advocacy Short and the rest of the Utstein group; and buy-in from not only the OECD but also the IMF and World Bank.  But the UN was already at work on creating goals from its own Declaration and document that had been agreed upon by 189 countries (Hulme 1009. 35-37).

Faced with the choice of a two track approach, whereby different national and international bodies pursued whichever set of goals that best suited their own interests, or merging the goals, it was the merging option that was ultimately pursued.  Colin Bradford, from USAID, is credited with creating an informal handwritten note that illustrated potential “concordance” between the IDGs and the earliest iteration of the goals that would be pulled from the Millennium Declaration.  It is from this “concordant vision” that work preceded to refine the eight goals that were agreed upon and fold some of the still un-answered demands for additional goals into the targets and indicators of these eight goals.

The Rest of the Story

The remainder of this site contains a more detailed look at each of the eight Millennium Development Goals, including a specific discussion of how the issue area of each goal reached prominence on the global agenda prior to the adoption of the MDGs.  Each of the eight goals is also illustrated with examples from five country case studies: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and Rwanda.

The story above is lengthy, yet it offers only a superficial window into the world’s highly imperfect efforts to address what is arguably the most pressing issues humanity: the savage inequality that divides humans and deprives those on the bottom from the most satisfying the most basic needs and rights; and the sustainability of the planet on which we all depend.  But we hope it provides a starting point for readers seeking to understand where the MDGs came from, and why their creators hoped they might have more success than the meeting and conferences and initiatives that preceded them.