The Millennium Development Goals
By 2015 all UN member states have pledged to:
Goal 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
- Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day.
- Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
Goal 2. Achieve universal primary education
- Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling.
Goal 3. Promote gender equality and empower women
- Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015.
Goal 4. Reduce child mortality
- Reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five.
Goal 5. Improve maternal health
- Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio.
Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
- Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.
- Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs; reverse loss of environmental resources.
- Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.
- Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020.
Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development
- Develop further an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory. Includes a commitment to good governance, development and poverty reduction—nationally and internationally
- Address the least developed countries’ special needs. This includes tariff- and quota-free access for their exports; enhanced debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries; cancellation of official bilateral debt; and more generous official development assistance for countries committed to poverty reduction
- Address the special needs of landlocked and small island developing States
- Deal comprehensively with developing countries’ debt problems through national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term
- In cooperation with the developing countries, develop decent and productive work for youth
- In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries
