The Eight Goals

1. Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger
2. Achieve Universal Primary Education
3. Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
4. Reduce Child Mortality
5. Improve Maternal Health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Other Diseases
7. Ensure Environmental Sustainability
8. Develop a Global Partnership for Development

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme hunger and poverty
Did you know that more than 1 billion people in the world do not have enough to food to eat, clean water to drink, or roofs over their heads? Nearly 238 million of these people are young children. Can you imagine such a life-a life where you have to struggle to have as little as $1 a day? This is called as living in extreme poverty. The first goal of the Millennium Development campaign is to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty.

Target: By 2015, reduce by half the population of people living in such extreme poverty.

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
Did you know that nearly 116 million children in the world do not go to school? Three fifths of these children are young girls. The reasons for the children not going to school are varied: some cannot afford the education, some have to work to bring in money to support their families, some do not have teachers who can teach them because they have HIV/AIDS, some children don't even have a school because it destroyed due to war or some other natural disasters. Can you imagine living near a school but not being able to go to it? Can you imagine being 8 or 9 years old and having to work to support a family and not being able to school? The second goal of the Millennium Development campaign is to help all children achieve universal primary education.

Target: Ensure that all boys and girls get at least a complete primary education by 2015.

Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
Did you know that two-thirds of the world's illiterate people are women? Did you know that the employment rate for women is two-thirds that of men? In many countries, women do not have an equal say in decisions that directly after their futures. This gender inequality exists in both developed and developing countries; however, it is more apparent in developing countries. Therefore, the third goal of the Millennium Development campaign is to work towards empowering women and making sure that both genders are treated equally.

Target: Ensure that gender disparities are eliminated and primary and secondary schools preferably by 2005 and at all levels by 2015.

Goal 4: Reduce child mortality
Did you know that about 30,000 children die each day around the world due to preventable illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, diarrhea, and acute respiratory infections? It is really sad that many of them die because they cannot afford a simple one-time vaccine that costs less than a quarter. This amounts to about 10 million child deaths per year, many of them under the age of five. Astonishingly, one child in ten dies before his or her fifth birthday in developing countries in comparison to one child in every 143 in developed countries. Don't you think that every child has a right to live regardless of where he or she is born? The fourth goal of the Millennium Development campaign focuses on reducing child mortality.

Target: Reduce by two-thirds child mortality under the age of five.

Goal 5: Improve maternal health
Imagine being a 12 year old girl living in a country where you could get married at 12. Yes, that happens to several young girls in some developing countries. Girls who should enjoy being a child, being in school, or playing with friends are expected to be an adult and raise a family. When these young girls, whose bodies are still growing and developing, get pregnant, they are forced to nurture growing babies in their own growing, still under-developed bodies. To complicate this, many of these young mothers do not have access to doctors or emergency medical care when they most need it. Needless to say, these girls often die during childbirth due to complications from pregnancy. It is shocking when you realize that almost one mother dies every minute of the day in some part of the world due to this. As a result, the Millennium Development campaign realized something needs to be done about improving maternal health.

Target: Reduce by three-quarters the amount of mothers dying during child-birth.

Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases
Did you know that about 8000 people die daily from HIV/AIDS? More than 15 million children from around the world have lost either one or both of their parents to HIV/AIDS. Nearly 900,000 children in Sub-Saharan Africa alone have lost their teachers to HIV/AIDS. Malaria kills more than one million people each year. Tuberculosis kills more than 2 million people annually. All these diseases have the greatest impact on the developing countries. The sixth goal of the Millennium Development campaign addresses this major concern.

Target: Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and incidences of malaria and other major diseases.

Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
About 1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water. About 2.4 billion people lack access to a toilet. Two million people die daily from infections spread through contaminated water or lack of access to a toilet. The 7 th goal agreed upon by the Millennium Development campaign addresses this issue.

Target:

• Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources
• Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water
• Achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020

Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development
Poor countries rely on aid, debt relief, and trade as major ways to pay for health care, jobs, education, and several other basic services. Goals 1 to 7 can only be achieved by a strong partnership between poor and rich countries. Did you know that the US government spent nearly $900 billion in arms in 2003 alone? On average, $300 billion is spent by developed, rich countries to support local agricultural producers. To achieve the MDGs by 2015, only an additional $70 billion per year in aid is needed additionally. To come up with this additional $70 billion, rich countries agreed to work towards giving 0.7% of their Gross National Income (GNI) to help the poor countries. Despite the fact that this was agreed upon several years ago, only five countries ( Sweden , Denmark , the Netherlands , Norway , and Luxembourg ) have managed to achieve this goal. The eighth goal of the Millennium Campaign addresses this issue.

Target:

• Develop an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory, includes a commitment to good governance, development and poverty reduction - nationally and internationally
• Address the least developed countries' special needs. This includes tariff- and quota-free access for their exports, enhanced debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries, cancellation of official bilateral debt, and more generous official development assistance for countries committed to poverty reduction
• Address the special needs of landlocked and small island developing states
• Deal comprehensively with developing countries' debt problems through national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term
• In cooperation with the developing countries, develop decent and productive work for youth
• In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries

In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications technologies.