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United Nations to eliminate poverty and to build a secure and peaceful world conducive to human development. The Millennium Development Goals embody that commitment and set quantified targets for reducing poverty, educating all children, improving the status of women, combating disease and reducing premature deaths, ensuring environmental sustainability, and establishing an effective partnership between rich countries and developing countries. The Goals have become widely accepted as a framework for measuring development progress. Their benchmarks and targets, looking back to 1990 and forward to 2015, provide yardsticks for measuring results. Taking the Goals seriously has helped to concentrate the attention of politicians, development professionals, and ordinary citizens on the need to work together and to use scarce resources more effectively.
Since the articulation of the Millennium Development Goals, World Development Indicators has reported on progress toward each goal. This year’s edition provides a more comprehensive survey of the main targets and indicators. Although the presentation here is based largely on regional averages, it is important to remember that the goals are commitments by countries. We cannot claim complete success as long as some countries lag behind. Nor is progress within countries uniform. Some important disparities are illustrated by examples of the differences between poor and rich and between urban and rural populations.
One third of the way toward the target date of 2015, there is evidence of progress but many challenges lie ahead. Global prospects for achieving the income poverty goal are good, thanks to strong economic growth in China, India, and other countries in Asia. But malnutrition persists even in rapidly growing economies, and millions of people are hungry.
Many countries have achieved the goal of universal primary education and, with primary school enrollment rates rising, many more will by 2015. But progress has been slow in parts of Africa and Asia, and more than 100 million children remain out of school.
The first target year of the gender equality goal has already arrived. Although more girls are attending school and in some places they outnumber boys, full equality of enrollments in primary and secondary school has not been universally achieved.
Progress toward the health goals has been slow. Only 33 countries are on track to reach the child mortality goal. Effective strategies for reducing maternal mortality are well known but hard to implement. HIV/AIDS continues to spread, and malaria and tuberculosis still afflict millions.
Most regions are on track to meet the drinking water target, but only Latin America and East Asia are on track to reach the sanitation target. Poor sanitation and contaminated drinking water remain major sources of disease. Slum populations continue to grow, and the indicators for the natural environment show that the world has not yet found the path to sustainable development.
Finally, building a global partnership for development between developed and developing countries and with the full and effective support of the international institutions remains a work in progress. With a decade to go achieving the Millennium Development Goals remains a huge challenge, one requiring additional resources and sustained effort.
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