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. Among the facts considered when creating this ambitious agenda were the following:

1. More than one billion people still subsist on less than one dollar a day. An estimated 824 million people suffer from chronic hunger in the developing world.
2. Approximately 113 million school-age children, of which 60% are girls, do not attend school.
3. Two thirds of the world’s illiterate are female, and the rate of employment of women is only two thirds that of men.
4. Around 11 million children under the age of five die each year, mainly from preventable diseases.
5. According to the World Water Development Report (WWDR), of all the people who died of diarrheal infections in 2001, 70% (or 1.4 million) were children.
6. In developing countries, one in 48 for women die during childbirth.
7. Across the world, forty million people are now infected with HIV/AIDS.
8. Malaria is a water-related disease that kills more than one million people each year, 90% in sub-Saharan Africa.
9. Some 50% of the world’s wetlands have been lost since 1900.
10. One billion people lack access to safe drinking water, 2.4 billion to adequate sanitation.
11. Many developing countries now spend more on debt service than on social services, severely crippling their development capacity.

Sources:
United Nations