The Millennium Development Goals are eight goals that a 192 United Nations menber states have agreed to try to achieve them by the year 2015, and they are the followings:1)- Get rid of extreme poverty and hunger: In some cuntries people cannot meet the basic needs for survival, like food, water, clothing,shelter, sanitation, education,and health care, and based on the World Bank those people who live in a severe state of poverty, they live on US $1 per day,or even less than that. The goal here is to reduce by half the propotion of those people who live on less than one U.S dollar a day, and who suffer from hunger
2)- Achieve universal primary education: a lot of children are hobbled by disease, malnutrition or developmental delays which make the learning capacities restricted for them, and the goal here is to ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling, which will speed progress toward every other Millennium Goal.
3)- Promote gender equality and empower women: Not every where we see that women are equal to men in rights, a lot of women do not have the same rights as men do,and one of these rights is aceess to education, according to UNICEF “Two-thirds of the world’s 799 million illiterate adults ages 15 and over are women”. In order to achieve other MDG, the number of boys in school should equal the number of girls in school. In order to combat poverty, disease, ensure enviromental sustainability….etc, we should eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education.
4)- Reduce child mortality: In some population there are a lot of children die in their 5 years of life because they start their life with no adequate means of nutrition, diarrhoea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth, measles, tetanus, HIV/AIDS…etc. Some of these illnesses are preventable, like measles, malaria, tetanus, but those deaths still occurs specifically on devoloping world. The goal here is to reduce the morality rate among children under five by two thirds, and as you see bellow I provided a map that I took from CIA World Factbook that discribe crude death rate by country (the Death rate (deaths/1,000 population)) :
5)- Improve maternal health: A lot of women die during or just after a pregnancy, these deaths have been medically preventable, but it is still happening in developed world, and it is caused by hemorrhage, infection, obstructed labor, hypertensive disorders in pregnancy, and complications of unsafe abortion. The united Nations estimated global maternatl mortality at 529,000. Maternal deaths occur in the same countries that have high rates of infant mortality reflecting generally poor nutrition and medical care, so the United Nation put maternal health as goal to achieve, there goal is to reduce the maternal mortality ratio by three quarters.
6)- Combat HIV/AIDS: AIDS has taken millions lives and it will take more if trends continue, and because ill parents are unable to work they cannot support their families, and their children drop out of school to help, and they may also fall to diseases, HIV/AIDS. Another killer disease is malaria, it kills children under five year, and if it is contructed during a pregnancy, it will seriously affect the size of a newborn., so the United Nation decide to halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, and the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
7)- Ensure environmental sustainability: Too many kids die and get diseases because of unsafe drinking water, deplorable sanitation, and poor hygiene. According to UNICEF, “in countries like Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda, four out of five children either use surface water or have to walk more than 15 minutes to find a protected water source”. Unmet needs like this is the cause of spread diseases like cholera, and infant diarrhoea. The United Nations goal is to Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources, and Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, and Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020. Concerning sanitation, and as you see bellow it’s a map from the UNICEF website that shows that half of the developing countries are still without the improved sanitation:
8)- Develop a global partnership for development: according to the United Nations this goal has the following targets:
a)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
b)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
c)Address the special needs of landlocked and small island developing States
d)Deal comprehensively with developing countries' debt problems through national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term
e)In cooperation with the developing countries, develop decent and productive work for youth
f)In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries
g)In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies— especially information and communications technologies
References:
[http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Metadata.aspx? ]
[http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/# ]
[http://www.unicef.org/mdg/disease.html]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDG]
[http://www.unicef.org/wes/mdgreport/sanitation1.php]
