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What are the Millennium Development Goals?
The Millennium Declaration was endorsed
by all 189 member states of the United
Nations at the end of the Millennium
Summit held in New York in September
2000.
The declaration listed eight
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that
would combat hunger and poverty and
improve education, health, the status of
women, and the environment by the year
2015. These goals are an international
commitment by all governments, agreed by
the heads of states. They are interrelated, so
fulfilling one helps to fulfil the others. The
first seven goals include measures of human
development in poor countries. Each goal
has one or more targets, and several
quantifiable indicators measure each
target.i Each country should adapt the MDGs
to its particular national context and report
on its progress accordingly.
At the Millennium Summit, world leaders also took
on several qualitative targets applicable to
rich countries, later collected in an eighth
Goal. The key elements of Goal 8, reaffirmed
by heads of states at the International
Financing for Development Conference in
2002, pledge financial support and policy
changes in debt relief, trade and economic
governance to assist poor countries’
domestic efforts to meet the first seven
Goals.
CIDSE and Caritas Internationalis aim at full
poverty eradication and the achievement of
social justice as early as possible in all
nations, in respect of their diversity. Our
member organisations fund development
programmes in almost all countries in the
South which contribute to complementing
governmental and multilateral development
programmes.
However, since the basis for
regional and national development lies in appropriate global structures, CIDSE and
Caritas Internationalis also undertake
advocacy and lobby activities with regard to
an improved international economic, trade
and financial environment that does not
impede the development efforts of the
South. We believe that it is possible to
mobilise faster the necessary resources for
eradicating poverty and to achieve more
justice in the relation between men and
women and regret that the appropriate
political will is still missing.
However, the
fact that all governments agreed on a
minimum of these common goals is a
political sign of hope and provides a useful
monitoring tool for civil society. For the first
time, the world’s leaders have agreed to
work together - within a given timeframe -
towards a world free from hunger and
poverty. If achieved, the Goals would
represent a first, even if insufficient step,
towards the elimination of poverty
worldwide, and they would demonstrate
that nations can work together for the
common good.
In effect, industrial countries
have agreed to extend their own economic
policies and promises to poor countries.
However, significant progress depends on
the commitment of political leaders to
implement the promises they have made in
the MDGs. It therefore requires organised
action on the part of individuals and civil
society organisations around the world to
hold them to account.
The MDGs combine and simplify the
international commitments made at the UN
Summits of the past decade. Thus, the MDGs
could provide a global policy framework for
governments, international organizations,
the private sector, and civil society to fight
poverty as well as social and gender
inequality.
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