At the turn of the new century, every one of the 192 member states of the United Nations committed to eight broad goals intended to radically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, set an ambitious agenda to cut extreme poverty while also pursuing improved access to education, health services, and safe drinking water.
More...
One thousand days from now -- Dec. 31, 2015 -- marks the end date for achieving these goals. Despite considerable skepticism when the MDGs were adopted that a broad and ambitious agenda would translate to concrete development impacts, we are on track to meet many of the targets laid out back in 2001 when the goals were finalized.
U.N. data indicate that the first goal, to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 per day, has already been achieved. As a result, more than 600 million people have moved out of the most extreme poverty imaginable. Progress on this goal has continued in every region of the world even in the aftermath of the economic crisis.
While the next thousand days are an important last push to achieve the MDGs, we need to also focus on what will happen beyond 2015. Last July, I was honored to be one of 26 people named by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to a U.N. high-level panel tasked with making recommendations to shape the post-2015 development agenda.
Our process is informed by the lessons we've learned from the MDGs -- which goals have been reached, where we have struggled to achieve equitable progress between regions, and what data and experience have shown us about the changing nature of extreme poverty.
There are goals we are unlikely to achieve by the end of 2014. We are only halfway toward meeting the goal of reducing the childhood mortality rate by two-thirds. This is an area where some regions have made more progress than others. In 2010, 82 percent of under-five child deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia -- a larger share of the global total than when the MDGs were enacted.
Maternal mortality, too, is an area where considerable regional disparities hamper progress. The MDGs targeted a three-quarters reduction in maternal mortality, and we have nearly halved the rate. But developing regions still have maternal mortality rates 15 times higher than developed regions. In 2010, an estimated 287,000 mothers died from reproductive complications worldwide.
The United States has made an enormous effort to achieve the MDGs through bilateral aid programs and multilateral institutions, through the dynamism of our NGOs and philanthropies, and through the innovations and contributions of our private sector. But there is perhaps no other country where the general public -- and the politicians and policy professionals who populate its capital -- know so little about the MDGs themselves.
SUBJECTS:
