Millennium Development Goals

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight international development goals that all 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organizations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. They include reducing extreme poverty, reducing child mortalityrates, fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS, and developing a global partnership for development.

Background

In 2001, recognizing the need to assist impoverished nations more aggressively, UN member states adopted the targets. The MDGs aim to spur development by improving social and economic conditions in the world's poorest countries.

They derive from earlier international development targets, and were officially established at the Millennium Summit in 2000, where all world leaders present adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, from which the eight goals were promoted.

Reduce child mortality

Target 5: Between 1990 and 2015, reduce the under-five mortality rate by two thirds.

Progress

In 2005, over 10 million children died before their fifth birthday. Although a significant number of countries have succeeded in improving the health and wellbeing of babies and children in recent years – the countries with the highest burdens have made the least progress and in some the situation has actually worsened. Progress is increasingly uneven, leaving large disparities between countries as well as between sub-groups within countries.

Unless efforts are increased, there is little hope of eliminating avoidable child deaths. If current trends continue, the MDG will not be achieved until 2045 – 30 years late.

Around 400 million children have no access to safe water. Some 1.4 million children every year - and 3,900 children every day - die because they lack access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.

Problems

• The health and well-being of women and their children are completely linked. There is a strong consensus that maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) programmes will only be effective if there is a continuum of care, from pregnancy through childbirth into childhood.
• Of the four million babies that die each year in the first 4 weeks of life (neonatal period), nearly three quarters could be prevented if women were adequately nourished and received appropriate care during pregnancy, childbirth and the postnatal period.
• Most deaths to children under five years are attributable to acute respiratory infections (mostly pneumonia), diarrhoea, malaria, measles, HIV/AIDS and neonatal conditions
• HIV/AIDS is a huge and growing problem for children. In 2006, the estimated number of children under 15 years old living with HIV was 2.3 million – 87% of whom are in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2010, the figure is likely to rise to more than 20 million.

• Malnutrition increases the risk of dying from these diseases and over half of all child deaths occur in children who are underweight.
• Malaria is a major cause of anaemia in pregnant women and children