The Millennium Development Goals and the Road to 2015 : Building on Progress and Responding to Crisis

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) provide a multidimensional framework for attacking poverty in a world of multi-polar growth. By focusing on measurable results, they provide a scorecard for assessing progress toward mutually agreed targets. And by enlisting the support of national governments, international agencies, and civil society in a development partnership, they have brought greater coherence to the global development effort. In this way they take us beyond the old, sterile opposition of 'developed' and 'developing' or 'north' and 'south.' The evidence from the last 20 years, documented in the statistical record of the MDGs, is that where conditions and policies are right for growth with equity, rapid and sustainable progress toward improving the lives of the poorest people can take place. Not every country will achieve the global MDG targets in the time allowed. Success has not been distributed evenly and there have been serious setbacks. Some countries are still burdened by legacies of bad policies, institutional failures, and civil and international conflict. For them, progress toward the MDGs has been delayed, but the examples of good progress by others point the way for their eventual success.