What are the real objectives of Millennium Development Goals (MDG)? Do you think that millennium development goals have been able to achieve the desired goals of poverty alleviation and sustainable development?

What are the real objectives of Millennium Development Goals (MDG)? Do you think that millennium development goals have been able to achieve the desired goals of poverty alleviation and sustainable development? (2015, 15 Marks)

The Millennium Development Goals, eight goals (later 21 targets) distilled in 2001 from the Millennium Declaration (resolution 55/2, September 2000), set a 1990 baseline and a 2015 deadline. Their lineage ran through the OECD’s International Development Goals of Shaping the 21st Century (1996). They achieved much on income poverty and far less on sustainability.

The Real Objectives

Stated objectives

  • Meet the basic needs of the poorest countries: income, food, schooling, health, gender parity, water and sanitation.
  • Concentrate effort on priority countries carrying the heaviest burden of poverty, hunger and disease, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
  • Treat poverty as multidimensional, echoing Amartya Sen‘s capability approach and the UNDP’s human development paradigm.

Underlying objectives

  • Rebuild the aid consensus after the “lost decade” of structural adjustment and 1990s aid fatigue, giving donors measurable results to show taxpayers.
  • Mobilise finance: Goal 8 and the Monterrey Consensus (2002) tied the goals to aid, debt relief and trade.
  • Discipline by numbers: Jeffrey D. Sachs‘s Millennium Project saw a costed “big push”; critics such as Sakiko Fukuda-Parr argued the targets narrowed development to what donors could count.

Poverty Alleviation: Substantial but Uneven

  • Extreme poverty was halved five years early, falling from about 1.9 billion people in 1990 to 836 million in 2015.
  • Use of an improved drinking-water source rose from 76% to 91%.
  • The hunger target was narrowly missed; under-five mortality fell from 90 to 43 per 1,000 live births, short of the two-thirds target, and maternal mortality by 45% against three-quarters.
  • Attribution is doubtful: most of the fall came from China, through domestic reform, and global poverty was already declining in the 1990s. William Easterly (The White Man’s Burden, 2006) argued that top-down planning claimed credit for growth it did not cause.
  • Inequality of outcomes: sub-Saharan Africa missed most targets despite record progress, because proportional targets penalised low baselines. India cut poverty from 47.8% (1990) to 21.9% (2011–12), beating its 23.9% target, but maternal mortality stood at 167 per 100,000 (2011–13) against a target of 109, and rural sanitation also fell short.

Sustainable Development: The Weakest Record

  • Goal 7 had no binding climate or biodiversity targets; emissions rose sharply and forest and biodiversity loss continued.
  • Sanitation was the most missed target.
  • Goal 8 carried no numerical obligations on donors, and the 0.7% aid pledge went largely unmet.
  • The goals ignored inequality within countries, governance and decent work, and their aggregates concealed rural, gender and class gaps.

Here the Global South’s complaint was sharpest: development was defined for it, not with it, since governments never negotiated the goals. These failures shaped the SDGs (2015): universal, negotiated, environmentally integrated and committed to “leave no one behind”.

Conclusion

The MDGs succeeded as an agenda-setting device that moved money and attention and coincided with historic poverty reduction. They did not secure sustainable development, and their real achievement was to expose the limits of an aid-centred, aggregate-target model, which the SDGs now try to correct.