Why The Millennium Goals Matter by Kemal Dervis. UNDP 8:47am 14th Sep, 2005   September 14, 2005    On Wednesday, the largest gathering of world leaders ever will convene at the United Nations in New York to confront complex challenges ranging from security and human rights to the reform of the UN itself. But there is no more important item on the 2005 World Summit agenda than the battle against extreme poverty, hunger and preventable disease.    This is a war we can win - never before have we had the resources, the technology and the essential public support needed to keep hundreds of millions people from being condemned to lives of abject deprivation. And we already have a practical and widely accepted battle plan: the Millennium Development Goals. Now is the time to ensure that we actually achieve these goals. We have 10 years to do it, but we have to start immediately.    Five years ago, at the UN's Millennium Summit, international leaders adopted a potentially historic pledge to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015, and also to reduce child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by the same time, among other goals. The secretary general was asked by UN member states to produce a "road map" to make these promises a reality. The result was the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, an eight-point distillation of the pledges of the summit with related statistical targets for measuring progress in health, education, gender equality and other categories.    Nearly a hundred nations are now using the MDGs for their own national development strategies, producing plans for tracking progress toward the goals within their own borders by 2015. The MDGs have been endorsed by the G-8 club of major industrial nations and adopted as a common strategy against extreme poverty by the World Bank, UN agencies like my own, and leading nongovernmental humanitarian groups.    What is perhaps even more important is that the goals have caught the imagination of ordinary citizens around the globe and have been embraced as tangible expressions of the concerns of ordinary people across the developing world: reducing child and maternal mortality, ensuring that every girl and boy gets a basic education, securing access to clean water and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other infectious yet preventable diseases.    The UN Development Program's annual Human Development Report, sent to world leaders last week, details the sobering consequences of inaction on these goals, including the avoidable deaths of 40 million children, and 400 million more people living in extreme poverty than would be the case if the goals were met. Our data also show that under current trends, many of the poorest countries - mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, but also in the former Soviet Union - will slip further away from these goals without swift and substantial improvement in aid levels, trade policies and national governance.    But projections are not destiny: These trends can be reversed. And that is why an explicit endorsement of the MDGs at the 2005 World Summit is so important.    The MDGs can make the next 10 years the decade in which we finally turn the corner on extreme poverty. For this to succeed we need more than rhetoric. The goals stipulate with needed precision what it is we are setting out to do, and allow us to chart progress toward these interlocking aims, year after year, country by country, to ensure that these promises are kept.    Those promises include efforts at comprehensive reform within developing nations, which are the indispensable other side of the grand global bargain that was agreed in principle at the 2000 summit. We also need to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of people around the world as the driving force of sustainable growth.    Every country will have its own approach to implementing the goals, but it is vital that the positive energy surrounding the MDGs is translated into action. The generosity of the world's more fortunate is there to be tapped: Just witness the response to the tsunami disaster and to Hurricane Katrina.    The Millennium Development Goals provide the best available framework for fulfilling the promise by world leaders at the summit in 2000 to "spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty." As leaders meet for next week's summit in New York, they have the historic opportunity - and responsibility - to make that promise come true.    (Kemal Dervis is Administrator of the United Nations Development Program. The latest Human Development Report is available via the link below. Published by the IHT) Visit the related web page
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