The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the world's most ambitious, targeted and comprehensive set of objectives ever set to address extreme poverty in its many forms. Despite serious challenges, such as the global food crisis and the recent economic slowdown, huge gains are still being made. These stories of success not only speak to the millions of lives that have been improved, but also to the potential for even greater breakthroughs moving forward. The following are some examples of successes that are demonstrating the feasibility of meeting the Goals (and more) by 2015:
Declining Child Mortality¶
Immunizations are an important tool in public health efforts to eradicate childhood diseases. One of the most successful global health initiatives in the world is a campaign to vaccinate children against measles. Led by the American Red Cross, the UN Foundation, WHO, UNICEF and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Measles Initiative has vaccinated over 600 million children since 2001, helping to reduce global measles mortality by 74% between 2000 and 2007. During the same period, measles deaths plunged by 89% in Africa alone. Estimates show that measles immunizations have helped avert almost 7.5 million deaths from the disease.
Tremendous progress is being made on reducing childhood mortality, not only through immunization campaigns, but also through the mass distribution of insecticide-treated anti-malarial bed nets and the use of other low-cost strategies. A UNICEF report, released this month, estimates that since 1990, the global child mortality rate has declined from 90 deaths per 1,000 live births to 65 per 1,000 live births, which means approximately 10,000 fewer children are dying each day. In sub-Saharan Africa, Malawi has had the greatest success, reducing the childhood mortality rate to 100 per 1,000 births in 2008 from 225 in 1990. While further efforts are still required to achieve the MDG target of reducing child mortality by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015, this new data reaffirms that making such progress is indeed possible.
Surging Primary School enrollment Rates¶
No child should be denied access to primary education because of an inability to pay school fees. Developing countries that have eliminated fees have seen incredible surges in primary school enrollment-34 million more children enrolled in primary schools between 1999 and 2006. For example, when Malawi abolished school fees in 1994, enrollment surged from 1.9 million to 3.2 million children in just three months. Uganda eliminated school fees in 1997 and enrollment increased by 58% within the first year of implementation. In 2001, Tanzania eliminated school fees and primary school enrollment grew by 50%, from 4.4 million in 2002 to 6.6 million in 2003. And in Kenya, since the first week of tuition-free school in January 2003, more than 1.3 million children entered school for the first time, pushing national enrollment from 5.9 million in 2002 to 7.2 million in 2004. With these achievements, sub-Saharan Africa is moving closer towards the MDG target of universal primary education for both boys and girls. To achieve this target, additional progress must be made to boost enrollment and retention of students and to improve quality of instruction.
Supporting an African Green Revolution¶
Noting the special challenges facing sub-Saharan Africa, global leaders and development experts have called for an African Green Revolution to help the continent achieve food security, economic prosperity and social development. Past green revolutions in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America more than doubled food production in these regions and helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of hunger. In contrast, Africa is the only region in the world where per capita food production has fallen in the last 30 years due, in part, to its dependency on rain-fed agriculture, the depletion of soil nutrients, and diminishing household plot sizes.
By training smallholder farmers on efficient use of agricultural inputs and providing them with temporary subsidies for fertilizer and better seeds, agricultural productivity can be improved quickly and dramatically throughout Africa.
An example of success can be found in Malawi, where for the past three years the country's voucher program for fertilizers and seeds has helped double agricultural productivity during this period. This ambitious subsidy program has helped lift Malawi from dependency on food aid to being a food-surplus nation, even exporting 300,000 tons of maize to neighboring Zimbabwe and providing another 5,000 tons of food aid to Lesotho during their 2007 food crises. Additionally, the bumper harvests resulting from the Malawi program are helping poor farmers to earn more income.
In 2006, the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA) was launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Chaired by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, AGRA is galvanizing pan-African momentum to implement practical solution to significantly boost farm productivity and incomes for the poor while safe-guarding the environment.
Most recently, in July 2009, the G8 announced a new $20 billion dollar initiative to support food security in the poorest parts of the world. This represents a significant international commitment and global step forward to tackle the root causes of hunger and extreme poverty, particularly in rural areas.
Malaria No More: a Dramatic Drop in Cases and Deaths¶
Increasing access to malaria control, including the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets for prevention and effective anti-malarial drugs for treatment, has helped countries decrease the number of deaths from the disease. For example, Rwanda experienced a 64% reduction in incidence and 66% decline in deaths from malaria within one year of distributing bed nets and making available artemisinin-based combination therapies (top line malaria treatments). In Ethiopia, these same interventions resulted in a 60% reduction in incidence and 51% decline in deaths between 2005 and 2007. Noting these and other global successes in fighting malaria, in April 2008 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for universal access to malaria control measures in Africa by 2010. In response, in September 2008 the global community committed $3 billion to implement the Global Malaria Action Plan, the first-ever comprehensive blueprint for global malaria control.
Saving Lives through Improved Access to Essential Medicines¶
Differential price agreements that adapt drug prices to the purchasing power of lower-income countries help even the world's poorest people access life-saving medicines. In the case of malaria, artemisinin-containing combination therapies-such as the drug Coartem from Novartis-are effective but more expensive treatments for the disease. To ensure Coartem reaches the people who need it most, Novartis sells the drug at lower costs to public health systems in developing countries. This public-private partnership has helped to dramatically increase the availability of effective malaria treatments.
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was launched as a unique partnership to support improved access to life-saving medicines in developing countries. The past decade has also seen a dramatic turnaround in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Together, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the Global Fund and the international community have helped expand access to antiretrovirals to people once deemed too poor to receive HIV treatment-from close to zero in 2000 to more than two million people in Africa alone by 2008.
Meeting the MDGs in the Poorest, Most Remote Communities in Sub-Saharan Africa¶
The Millennium Villages project offers an innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty and achieve the Goals. Using a holistic and community-led approach, the Millennium Villages project supports integrated and targeted investments in agriculture, education, health, infrastructure and business development in the poorest and most remote agricultural communities in extreme poverty-the very people whom the MDGs are most specifically intended to support. Key successes of the Millennium Villages include more than doubling average food production across sites, distributing over 330,000 bed nets and providing more than 80,000 children with locally-produced school meals.
Designed to be replicable and scalable, the Millennium Villages also aim to demonstrate that the Goals are feasible if communities are empowered with proven and practical technologies for addressing the root causes of extreme poverty. Describing the project's success, an external review conducted by the Overseas Development Institute found that, "The Millennium Villages project (MVP) has achieved remarkable results and has demonstrated the impact of greater investment in evidence-based, low-cost interventions at the village level to make progress on the Millennium Development Goals."