ABSTRACT
At the Millennium Summit in 2000, the world community agreed on eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to ensure poverty reduction and sustainable development for all. Poverty was seen in a wider context, encompassing income poverty, hunger, lack of educational opportunities, gender bias, morbidity, and premature mortality which are taken up in the first six of the eight MDGs. The first Millennium Development Goal, agreed to by the world community at the Millennium Summit in 2000, calls for the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger. The targets agreed are somewhat more modest and refer to halving, between 1990 and 2015, the share of the population living on less than $1 a day, and halving the proportion of the population who suffer from hunger. For these two targets, three indicators were chosen. For the first target, the World Bank has been charged to regularly produce the relevant indicator, i.e. the share of the population that is living on less than a $1 a day. For the second target, there are two indicators. The first is to be monitored by UNICEF and WHO and refers to halving the share of children under five years of age who are underweight, and the second is to be monitored by the FAO and refers to halving the share of the population who are below minimum recommended levels of dietary intake.
