ABSTRACT

In September 2000 United Nations members adopted the Millennium Declaration, out of which came the ‘Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs) (see Box 1.1). Since then, these goals have been widely used by multilateral agencies, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in framing development policies in order to achieve the associated targets by 2015. Such clearly stated goals suggest that defining ‘development’ is easy and that what is important is the end point that a society gets to, not how those goals are achieved.