In its Millennium Declaration of September 2000, the United Nations (UN) adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), to be reached in 2015 through concerted efforts worldwide. According to UN calculations, the estimated costs in terms of additional development aid of meeting the MDGs in all countries vary from US$121 billion in 2006 to $189 billion in 2015. It appears that while Asia is we...

the world has made a great deal of progress through the millennium development goals (mdgs) to improve the health and well-being of people around the globe, but there remains a long way to go. here we provide reflections on rwanda’s experience in working to meet the health-related targets of the mdgs. this experience has informed our proposal of five guiding principles that may be useful for co...

The United Nations (UN) is negotiating the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the predecessors of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). There is now an opportunity to include one of the disease categories with the greatest impact on the global burden of disease (GBD), namely mental illness. This letter presents the case for the inclusion of mental health within the SDGs, drawn f...

Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 6 has two HIV/AIDS commitments: to have halted and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015 and to ensure access to treatment among all those in need by 2010. Given the almost universal lack of access to HIV testing, prevention and treatment for children in high prevalence countries in 2000, the achievements of the past 15 years have been extraordinary, ...

This paper uses two classes of multidimensional indices to measure countries’ evolution towards the achievement of United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Our results suggest that improvements in the different MDGs tend to be uncorrelated among them and, on average, countries are largely offtrack in their way towards MDGs achievement. This evolution has been highly uneven across co...

At a global summit held in the year 2000, world leaders committed themselves to strive for the attainment by 2015 of a set of 8 far-reaching developmental mileposts known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Unlike previous global agreements (for example, the Alma Ata 'Health for All by the Year 2000' declaration), the MDGs were specifically tied to numerical benchmarks consisting of 21 ...

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, one hundred eighty nine Member States adopted the Millennium Declaration and pledged to reach the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. This represented an unprecedented consensus by world leaders on the major global challenges of the 21st century as well as a common commitment to meet these challenges. The MDG provided a road map an...

Maternal health is one of the main global health challenges and reduction of the maternal mortality ratio, from the present 0.6 mio. per year, by three-quarters by 2015 is the target for the fifth Millennium Development Goal (MDG 5). However this goal is the one towards which the least progress has been made. There is not a simple and straight-forward intervention, which by itself will bring ma...