The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
What are the goals; what are the facts

Facts and figures taken from Development Committee papers presented at the 2003 Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the IMF

Facts

The depth of the challenge varies across the different goals:

• In the year 2000, 115 million primary school-age children in developing countries were not in school, of which 79 million had never attended school.
• Over 64 million (56%) of the out-of-school children were girls; 42 million (37%) were from Sub-Saharan Africa.
• The gender gap for low-income countries is, on average, 11 percentage points at the primary level, and 19 percentage points at the secondary level.
• More than 42 million people live with HIV/AIDS today, compared to 12.9 million in 1992. The disease has infected 39 million adults and 3 million children.
• The HIV/AIDS disease is especially hard hitting in Sub-Saharan Africa, which now has 29.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS, of which 10 million are aged 15-24 and almost 3 million are under 15. They have suffered approximately 3.5 million new infections and lost 2.4 million people to AIDS in 2002. Today, more than 58 percent of those living with HIV/AIDS in Africa are women.
• In many Southern African countries AIDS has reduced life expectancy from around 60 years to below 40 years.
• In 2001, 3 million people died from HIV/AIDS. The great majority (99%) of these deaths occurred in the developing world—73% in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.
• Each year Zambia loses half as many teachers as it trains to HIV/AIDS.
• At present, the Eastern European nations and Central Asian republics face the fastest growing HIV/AIDS epidemic.
• The HIV/AIDS epidemic is widespread in the Latin America and Caribbean region, where an estimated 1.9 million people are living with the disease, and about 210,000 people were newly infected in 2002.
• It is estimated that over two million people are living with HIV/AIDS in East Asia and the Pacific.
• More than 60% of all child mortality is associated with malnutrition.
• Each minute a woman dies in pregnancy or childbirth, with 99% of maternal deaths occurring in developing countries.
• In 2002, almost 11 million children died before their fifth birthday. 99% of these deaths occurred in developing countries: 4.5 million (42%) were in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, with the bulk of the remaining deaths in South Asia (35%).
• Under-five mortality rate among the poorest quarter of the world’s population is ten times that among the richest quarter.
• An estimated 140 million children under the age of five are underweight, almost half of these (65 million) in South Asia. In 1998, an estimated 843 million people were considered to be undernourished based on their food intake.
• In 2000, 520,000 women died during pregnancy or childbirth: only 1,000 of these deaths occurred in the industrialized developing world; 252,000 took place in Sub-Saharan Africa. The maternal mortality ratio is twenty times higher among the poorest quarter of the world’s population than among the richest quarter.
• Life expectancy has declined by as much as 20 years in the countries with the highest infection rates, and decade-long improvements in child mortality reversed.
• Tuberculosis (TB) claims 2 million lives every year, and malaria is associated with over 1 million deaths.
• Only 17% of low-income countries are currently "on target" for the under-five mortality goal.
• In middle-income countries, the burden of disease has shifted to noncommunicable diseases, such as diabetes, cancers, and cardiovascular diseases, requiring an increased focus on prevention.
• In the next 15 minutes about 90 children in developing countries — six children per minute — will have died from disease caused by unsafe water and inadequate sanitation.
• At present roughly 1 billion people in the developing world live without access to safe drinking water, 2.2 billion people without adequate sanitation, and 4 billion live in conditions where their wastewater is discharged untreated into local water bodies. This translates to approximately two out of every ten people are without access to safe water supply; five out of ten people live without adequate sanitation (excreta disposal) and nine out of ten people do not have their wastewaters treated to any degree.

List of goals and targets

Goal 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Target 1. Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day.

Target 2. Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

Goal 2. Achieve universal primary education

Target 3. Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.

Goal 3. Promote gender equality and empower women

Target 4. Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and to all levels of education no later than 2015.

Goal 4. Reduce child mortality

Target 5. Reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate

Goal 5. Improve maternal health

Target 6. Reduce by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio.

Goal 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

Target 7. Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS

Target 8. Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

Goal 7. Ensure environmental sustainability

Target 9. Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the losses of environmental resources.

Target 10. Halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.

Target 11. By 2020 to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.