ABSTRACT
The Millennium Development Goals are the world’s time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions—income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion—while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability. The year 2005 should inaugurate a decade of bold action. Based on work conducted by more than 250 of the world’s leading development practitioners over the past two years in the context of the United Nations Millennium Project, this report presents a practical plan for achieving the Goals. Many countries are on track to achieve at least some of the Goals by the appointed year, 2015. Sub-Saharan Africa, most dramatically, has been in a downward spiral of AIDS, resurgent malaria, falling food output per person, deteriorating shelter conditions, and environmental degradation, so that most countries in Africa are far off track to achieve most or all of the Goals. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
