The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight targeted development aims designed to free humanity from extreme poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease by 2015. Together, they form a blueprint for development agreed upon by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions.

Reliable, timely and internationally comparable data on the MDG progress indicators are crucial for holding the international community to account, encouraging public support and funding for development, allocating aid effectively, and comparing progress among regions and across countries. This report draws on data from numerous international agencies and national governments to present an accounting to date of how far the world has come in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It outlines the significant progress made by some countries towards the MDGs, but also demonstrates that efforts to reach the MDGs by 2015 still need to be intensified. They must address disparities in progress between urban and rural areas, and increase efforts to target the world’s hardest to reach populations, namely the extremely poor and those disadvantaged due to their sex, age, ethnicity or disability.

Document Highlights

• Despite significant setbacks after the 2008-2009 economic crisis, the world is on track to reach the MDG poverty-reduction target by 2015.
• Some of the world’s poorest countries, including Burundi, Rwanda, Samoa, Togo and the United Republic of Tanzania, have made the greatest strides in education.
• Every region has made progress in improving access to clean drinking water.
• Investments in preventing and treating HIV have caused new HIV infections to drop by 21 percent since 1997, when they peaked.
• The number of deaths of children under the age of five declined from 12.4 million in 1990 to 8.1 million in 2009.