11 Facts About Millennium Development Goals

In 2000, the leaders of the 189 countries that are members of the UN agreed to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which aim to improve the state of global poverty by 2015. How close are they to improving their concerns? Let's check up on them.

1. About 830 million people still subsist on less than one dollar a day. The UN still wants to slash that number by half by 2015, but hunger may have spiked in 2009 due to global food and financial crises.
2. One in four children around the world is currently not in school, but the UN hopes to get every child an education by their deadline.
3. Two thirds of the world’s illiterate are female, and the rate of employment of women is only at 41%.
4. From 1990 to 2008, the mortality rate for children under the age of five was slashed from 12.5 million to 8.8 million. In 2008, 10,000 fewer children died each day than in 1990. However, in 67 countries (many in sub-Sahara Africa and Southern Asia), still have high mortality rates.
5. Nearly one in five children dies each year due to diarrhoeal diseases (probably more so in places such as Southern Asia). It kills more young children than AIDS, malaria and measles combined.
6. The death for women during childbirth or from complications during pregnancy dropped by 34% from 1990 to 2008.
7. Across the world, 33.4 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. That may seem like a lot, but a bigger percentage is living with the disease for longer periods of time due to new methods of therapy.
8. Malaria is a water-related disease that kills more than one million people each year, 89% in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the production of mosquito nets has increased fivefold, growing from 30 million in 2004 to 150 million in 2009.
9. While deforesting has gone down about 3 million hectares between 1990 and 2009, the amount at which is lost is still disturbingly high.
10. Globally, about eight out of 10 people who are still without clean drinking water live in rural areas.
11. Many developing countries now spend more on debt service than on social services, severely crippling their development capacity.

Sources:

United Nations Millennium Development Goals Report, 2010