From millennium development goals to sustainable development goals

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) mark a historic and effective method of global mobilization to achieve a set of important social priorities worldwide. They express widespread public concern about poverty, hunger, disease, unmet schooling, gender inequality, and environmental degradation.

By packaging these priorities into an easily understandable set of eight goals, and by establishing measurable and time bound objectives, the MDGs help to promote global awareness, political accountability, improved metrics, social feedback, and public pressures.{{more}}

As described by Bill Gates, the MDGs have become a type of global report card for the fight against poverty for the 15 years from 2000 to 2015. As with most report cards, they generate incentives to improve performance, even if not quite enough incentives for both rich and poor countries to produce a global class of straight-A students.

Developing countries have made substantial progress towards achievement of the MDGs, although the progress is highly variable across goals, countries, and regions. Mainly because of startling economic growth in China, developing countries as a whole have cut the poverty rate by half between 1990 and 2010.

Some countries will have achieved all or most of the MDGs, whereas others will achieve very few. By the end of this year, most countries will have made meaningful progress towards most of the goals. Moreover, for more than a decade, the MDGs have remained a focus of global policy debates and national policy planning. They have become incorporated into the work of non-governmental organizations and civil society more generally, and are taught to students at all levels of education.

The probable shortfall in achievement of the MDGs is indeed serious, regrettable, and deeply painful for people with low income. The shortfall represents a set of operational failures that implicate many stakeholders, in both poor and rich countries. Promises of official development assistance by rich countries, for example, have not been kept.

Nonetheless, there is widespread feeling among policy makers and civil society that progress against poverty, hunger, and disease is notable; that the MDGs have played an important part in securing that progress; and that globally agreed goals to fight poverty should continue beyond 2015. In a world already undergoing dangerous climate change and other serious environmental ills, there is also widespread understanding that worldwide environmental objectives need a higher profile alongside the poverty-reduction objectives.

For these reasons, the world’s governments have adopted a new round of global goals to follow the 15-year MDG period. These goals are now called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs are numerous and where health is concerned, they speak to good health and well-being, clean water and sanitation, climate action and sustaining life on land and below water.

Dr Rosmond Adams is a medical doctor and a public health specialist. He may be emailed at adamsrosmond@gmail.com