Progress Toward the MDGs Is Mixed

by Hilary French

As the mid-point approaches in efforts to meet the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, progress toward achieving them is uneven. Although many countries have made important strides, greater efforts by both industrial and developing nations are needed to accelerate action.1

World leaders first adopted the MDGs in preliminary form at the U.N. Millennium Assembly in September 2000.2 In addition to eight overarching goals, the MDGs have 18 specific targets, most of which are to be achieved by 2015. These include cutting poverty and hunger rates in half from their 1990 levels, reducing child mortality by two thirds, and halving the proportion of people lacking access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation. 3 (See Box 1.) The United Nations also developed a set of 48 indicators to monitor progress toward the MDGs.4

Current estimates suggest that the world is on track to meet the overarching income poverty target—to halve by 2015 the proportion of people living on less than $1 per day.5 The share of the developing world’s population living in extreme poverty declined from 27.9 percent in 1990 to 19.4 percent in 2002 (the most recent year for which data are available). 6 This drop was driven in no small measure by particularly rapid progress in poverty reduction in much of Asia. Trends have unfortunately been less encouraging in other regions, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty increased by 140 million between 1990 and 2002 due to population growth despite a modest decline in the overall poverty rate.7 If present trends continue, few African countries are expected to meet the 2015 target for income poverty.8

The situation is even bleaker when it comes to hunger. Although the proportion of people suffering from hunger worldwide declined modestly over the last decade, the absolute numbers are rising, with an estimated 834 million chronically undernourished people in developing countries at last count.9

Child mortality trends are somewhat more positive, with 2.1 million fewer deaths among children under five in 2004 than in 1990.10 Still, the U.N. Development Programme estimates that at current rates of progress, the target of reducing by two thirds the child mortality rate by 2015 will be missed by some 4.4 million deaths that year.11

Major challenges also remain in efforts to meet other human development goals, such as those related to gender equity, maternal health, and deadly diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. The World Bank reports that all regions are off track on at least some of these goals and that South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are off target on all of them.12

Nonetheless, there are also some encouraging signs. For example, the number of countries set to meet the goal of providing universal primary education by 2015 has increased signifi- cantly since 2000, and gender gaps in access to primary and secondary education are narrowing. 13 The number of AIDS patients in developing countries with access to treatment has increased rapidly, rising from less than 100,000 in 2000 to nearly 1 million in 2005.14 Efforts to combat malaria by providing bednets and better treatment options are also expanding quickly: the distribution of insecticide-treated bednets increased 10-fold in sub-Saharan Africa between 1999 and 2003.15

Progress toward ensuring environmental sustainability is mixed at best. The MDGs call on countries to cut in half by 2015 the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. Recent analyses suggest that the world is on track to meet the drinking water target: the share of people using drinking water from improved sources rose from 78 percent in 1990 to 83 percent in 2004.16 But more than 1 billion people worldwide still lack access to an improved water supply, including two out of every five individuals in sub-Saharan Africa.17 And as for sanitation, the picture is substantially worse. Although the share of people in the developing world with access to improved sanitation facilities increased from 49 percent in 1990 to 59 percent in 2004, 2.6 billion people still lack connections to public sewers or even access to simple pit latrines or other improved sanitation facilities.18 Current estimates suggest that the overall 2015 target for sanitation is unlikely to be met.19

The MDGs also call on countries to integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and to reverse the loss of environmental resources. At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, governments adopted a number of related additional targets, including restoring fisheries to their maximum sustainable yields by 2015 and significantly reducing the rate of biological diversity loss by 2010.20 But progress toward these goals has been inadequate. Jeffrey Sachs, who for several years was Special Advisor for the MDGs to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, recently noted that there was little awareness of the 2010 biological diversity target and that the goal was not being achieved.21 He called the environment the biggest challenge facing humanity and noted that gains against poverty could be “washed away” by forces such as tropical storms, massive flooding, droughts, loss of snow melt, and desertification.22

Efforts to develop a global partnership for development have also been uneven. On the encouraging side, donor aid to developing countries has risen steadily since 1997, reaching $106 billion in 2005.23 But aid expenditures continue to be unequally distributed, in part due to political calculations. More than 60 percent of the increase in official development assistance (ODA) between 2001 and 2004 went to just three countries—Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Iraq—which between them are home to fewer than 3 percent of the developing world’s impoverished people.24 Furthermore, stepped-up debt relief has accounted for over half of the increase in ODA since 1997 and three quarters of it in 2005.25 Although this has contributed to a steady reduction in debt service payments for 29 heavily indebted poor countries since 1998, there is no guarantee that it will continue or that governments will channel the savings into efforts to meet the MDGs.26

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Notes
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