What are the Millennium Development Goals?

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions. They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.

	"We will have time to reach the Millennium Development Goals – worldwide and in most, or even all, individual countries – but only if we break with business as usual. We cannot win overnight. Success will require sustained action across the entire decade between now and the deadline. It takes time to train the teachers, nurses and engineers; to build the roads, schools and hospitals; to grow the small and large businesses able to create the jobs and income needed. So we must start now. And we must more than double global development assistance over the next few years. Nothing less will help to achieve the Goals." United Nations Secretary-General

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• Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling

• Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferaably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015

• Reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five

• Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio

• Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS
  
  
• Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases

• Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources
  
  
• Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water
  
  
• Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020

• 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
  
  
• 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
  
  
• Address the special needs of landlocked and small island developing States
  
  
• Deal comprehensively with developing countries' debt problems through national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term
  
  
• In cooperation with the developing countries, develop decentand productive work for youth
  
  
• In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries
  
  
• In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies— especially information and communications technologies