MDGs: Are they Attainable?

If you are a part of UNA-USA and YPIC, you should be up on your vocabulary, and MDG should be a regular part of your vernacular. However, many people might hear MDG and think it is an acronym for an infectious disease! They couldn't be further from the truth. MDGs are the United Nation's eight benchmarks set out by 192 world leaders in 2000, in order to cut world poverty in half in the first 15 years of the new millennium. Essentially, if we meet these eight benchmarks, we will see our world radically change for the better! These goals span from topics of health to women and children, to development and our environment. See http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ for more information on the MDGs.

Here at the United Nations Association and in our YPIC groups across the country, we have been holding events to raise money for MDG-related causes, increase Americans' awareness of the MDGs and do our part to uphold the goals of the United Nations Charter and ultimately, make the world a better place for all.

According to an article released from Reuters today, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has said that without funding increases, meeting the MDGs by 2015 is going to be tough. Only five countries -- Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden -- have met a long-standing U.N. target of devoting 0.7 percent of gross national income to development aid, and without other countries stepping up to the plate, it is going to be a rough road ahead.

Well, we world-changers sometimes have pie-in-the-sky ambitions when it comes to changing the world, but there have been significant people, like Jeffrey Sachs, who have spoken or written books on how we can meet the goals set out for this new Millennium. It would be sad to see that we cannot meet the goals set out in 2000 by all the world's leaders to halve world poverty by 2015, because of funding shortfalls.

"The lack of any significant increase in official development assistance since 2004 makes it impossible, even for well-governed countries, to meet the Millennium Development Goals," Ban Ki-Moon said.

MDG Soundbyte: 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.

Note from Sultana: For all our sakes, I hope that we can find another way, without trying to appeal for great funding gaps. Certainly, additional monies will help, but we cannot count on every government being able to get this type of funding approved in their respective legislature. Getting the MDGs to be attainable is going to take creativity on all our parts, so let's get moving.

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