In September of the year 2000, leaders of 189 countries met at the United Nations in New York and endorsed the Millennium Declaration, a commitment to work together to build a safer, more prosperous and equitable world. The Declaration was translated into a roadmap setting out eight time-bound and measurable goals to be reached by 2015, known as the Millennium Development Goals, namely:
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
- Reduce by half the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day
- Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people
- Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
- Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
- Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015
4. Reduce child mortality
- Reduce by two thirds the mortality of children under five
5. Improve maternal health
- Reduce maternal mortality by three quarters
- Achieve universal access to reproductive health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
- Halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS
- Achieve, by 2010, universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it
- Halt and reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
- Integrate principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes;
reverse the loss of environmental resources - Reduce biodiversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss
- Halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation
- Improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020
8. Develop a global partnership for development
- Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system
- Address special needs of the least developed countries, landlocked countries and small island developing States
- Deal comprehensively with developing countries’ debt
- 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
For more information, please visit: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals
Issued by the UN Department of Public Information
