Millennium Development Goals
To accelerate progress, the G8 finance ministers agreed in June 2005 to provide enough funds to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the African Development Bank (AfDB) to cancel $40 to $55 billion in debt owed by members of the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) to allow them to redirect resources to programs for improving health and education and for alleviating poverty.
New commitments targeted women's and children's health, and new initiatives in the worldwide battle against poverty, hunger and disease.
Following the end of the Cold War, a series of UN‑led conferences in the 1990s had focused on issues such as children, nutrition, human rights and women, producing commitments for combined international action on those matters.
[3] The resulting 1996 report, "Shaping the 21st Century", turned some of the Copenhagen commitments into six monitorable "International Development Goals", which had similar content and form to the eventual MDGs: halving poverty by 2015; universal primary education by 2015; eliminating gender disparity in schools by 2005; reductions in infant, child and maternal mortality by 2015, universal access to reproductive health services by 2015 and adequate national strategies for sustainable development in place everywhere by 2015.
[6] Annan's report, when published in April 2000 under the title "We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century", framed the questions of UN reform within the larger challenges facing the world, the chief of which was identified as "to ensure that globalization becomes a positive force for all the world's people, instead of leaving billions of them behind in squalor".
Infrastructure objectives include access to safe drinking water, energy and modern information/communication technology; increased farm outputs using sustainable practices; transportation; and environment.
In the case of MDG 4, developing countries such as Bangladesh have shown that it is possible to reduce child mortality with only modest growth with inexpensive yet effective interventions, such as measles immunization.
These measures include political, organizational, and functional dimensions of scaling up, and the need to nurture local organizations.
Between 1990 and 2010 the population living on less than $1.25 a day in developing countries halved to 21%, or 1.2 billion people, achieving MDG 1A before the target date, although the biggest decline was in China, which took no notice of the goal.
[34] The World Bank estimated that MDG 1A (halving the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day) was achieved in 2008 mainly due to the results from these two countries and East Asia.
Some 18 varieties of this strain became available, enabling African farmers to produce enough rice to feed their families and have extra to sell.
He worked with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000–2001 to design and launch The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
On behalf of Annan, from 2002 to 2006 he chaired the UN Millennium Project, which was tasked with developing a concrete action plan to achieve the MDGs.
The recommendations for rural Africa are currently being implemented and documented in the Millennium Villages, and in several national scale-up efforts such as in Nigeria.
The Millennium Villages Project, which Sachs directs, operates in more than a dozen African countries and covers more than 500,000 people.
The MVP has engendered considerable controversy associated as critics have questioned both the design of the project and claims made for its success.
"[41] Critics have pointed to the failure to include suitable controls that would allow an accurate determination of whether the Projects methods were responsible for any observed gains in economic development.
[42] Increased focus on gender issues could accelerate MDG progress, e.g. empowering women through access to paid work could help reduce child mortality.
[43] In South Asian countries babies often suffered from low birth weight and high mortality due to limited access to healthcare and maternal malnutrition.
[43] Although the resources, technology and knowledge exist to decrease poverty through improving gender equality, the political will is often missing.
[46] However MDG monitor points out that while parity has been achieved across the developing world, there are regional and national differences favouring girls in some cases and boys in others.
"[46] Over the past 35 years, UN members have repeatedly "commit[ted] 0.7% of rich-countries' gross national income (GNI) to Official Development Assistance".
[36] David Hulme and James Scott noted that the process of creating the MDGs was diffuse, having no single architect and "no clear start or end".
[3] The entire MDG process has been accused of lacking legitimacy as a result of failure to include, often, the voices of the very participants that the MDGs seek to assist.
The MDGs lacked strong objectives and indicators for within-country equality, despite significant disparities in many developing nations.
"[61] A publication from 2005 argued that goals related to maternal mortality, malaria and tuberculosis are impossible to measure and that current UN estimates lack scientific validity or are missing.
The study also argued that without accurate measures, it is impossible to determine the amount of progress, leaving MDGs as little more than a rhetorical call to arms.
[62] MDG proponents such as McArthur and Sachs countered that setting goals is still valid despite measurement difficulties, as they provide a political and operational framework to efforts.
Examples abound, including Brazil's cash transfers, Uganda's eliminations of user fees and the subsequent huge increase in visits from the very poorest or else Mauritius's dual-track approach to liberalization (inclusive growth and inclusive development) aiding it on its road into the World Trade Organization.
On 31 July 2012, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed 26 public and private leaders to advise him on the post-MDG agenda.
