Posted by

Pip Christie

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In 2000 the UN Member Nations made a commitment to achieve the following eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development

With the deadline looming fast upon us, what can we learn from the achievements that the MDGs brought? What about their weaknesses? Where do we go from here?

Indeed, there have been some great successes. We have moved from 43% of the developing world living on less than a dollar a day in 1990 to 20.6% in 2010, unarguably a huge improvement. However, it has also been suggested that minority groups such as indigenous peoples were left out of the agenda. Yes they are often remotely located, thus hard to work with and perhaps easily forgotten but that’s a whole 5% of the world’s population supposedly left behind.

The UN has established a Task Team to work on the post-2015 UN development agenda, which will hopefully help to establish more of a level playing field. It is important to note that in their review of the MDGs the UN Task Team recognised a flaw in the tendency just outline the end goal with little recognition of the importance of the journey required in order to get there. Such a statement is encouraging to see as it shows that the intention is not to simply replicate the MDGs for another fifteen years.

At the RioConference, UN member states agreed to develop a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. These have been proposed as follows:

1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture
3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
4. Ensure inclusive and equitable education and promote life-long learning opportunities for all
5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all
8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation
10. Reduce inequality within and among countries
11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainable manage forests, combat desertification, and half and reverse land degradation and half biodiversity loss
16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development

A notable improvement from the last round, as mentioned, is the increased focus on how we intend to reach these goals, more details of which can be found here (http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/focussdgs.html). Although, once again, the goals have received criticism, primarily following the theme that the list is too long or that certain goals should be higher up.

Nonetheless, possibly the biggest difference between the SDGs and MDGs is that the SDGs will be applicable to all nations as opposed to being primarily advertised as ‘anti-poverty’ goals. There is a tendency in the Global North to assume that ‘we have made it’ and development and human rights have been achieved when in reality this is not the case at all. It will be interesting to follow this next chapter and see what we have been able to learn from the past.