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This chapter first evaluates the MDGs achievements. The MDGs are evaluated positively for their achievements in poverty reduction, gender disparity in school education, gender equality and some of the health related goals. They have not succeeded in, among others, maternal mortality, sanitation and environmental sustainability. The critical weakness lies in the lack of implementation mechanisms. Lessons from the MDGs tell us that in order for the SDGs to be more effective they need to take into account a multilayered approach also tailored at regional and national levels providing a menu of options for actors to select from. Regarding the health related goals focus is on child mortality and the role of GAVI and Norway in this context and both these actors have contributed to a fairly high score on this goal and individual leadership has been particularly important. The lessons also underline the significance of mobilizing money. A final lesson relates to the virtue of combining UN and non-UN efforts. While the UN is necessary to secure legitimacy, smaller and more flexible bodies are often necessary to reach ambitious goals.

This chapter discusses the Millennium Development Goals. The Millennium Development Goals were developed in 2000 by the United Nations in an attempt to address the primary issues and provide a roadmap to solutions. The goals were derived from the UN’s Millennium Declaration, which affirmed a collective responsibility for global equality and equity and was signed by 189 nations. The Millennium Development Goals set clear and precise targets for achieving the commitments made in the Millennium Declaration; the objective is to accomplish them by 2015. While in the past development goals tended to focus on economic growth, these goals focus on social development. They are also aligned with the human rights guaranteed by the UNDR. The goals are connected in that the achievement of one makes it easier to achieve the others. As noted throughout this text, poverty, lack of education, and discrimination are risk factors for many social problems, and therefore, reducing them can reduce other issues as well.

Mainstream thinking about governance focuses on rule-making and directs attention to the challenges of developing rules, promulgating implementing regulations, and dealing with matters of compliance and enforcement. But this is not the only method for meeting needs for governance in complex systems. An alternative strategy centers on goal-setting and features the establishment of clearcut priorities, the allocation of resources to address these priorities, the development of effective teams with a mandate to pursue goals, and the introduction of metrics to measure progress toward goal fulfillment. While goal-setting is more familiar to those working at subnational and even local levels, cases like the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals indicate that this strategy is usable in largescale settings as well. In some cases (e.g. the regime created under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), rule-making and goal-setting are joined together in a single governance system. But goal-setting is a distinct governance strategy with a logic of its own. It makes sense in a variety of settings to compare and contrast the relative merits of goal-setting and other governance strategies in devising arrangements likely to prove effective in solving specific problems.

When development studies were born, after decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century, poverty was not an important concern of policy-makers. This chapter asks how this situation changed in the early 1970s, to launch the main question of how the interests of the poor became incorporated in policy-making. New data became available, showing that famine was still occurring and that a third of the poor were not gaining from growth; inclusive policies were presented as a means of allaying threats to state security within a cold war environment, especially in Asian developing countries; and a big boost was given to these policies by the commitment of donors – especially Robert MacNamara, the new World Bank president – to reorientate lending policies towards urban poverty and rural development. Under the stress of global crisis, poverty focus among aid donors decayed in the 1980s, but it continued among many recipients, especially in South and South-East Asia. In the 1990s, it was relaunched, first tentatively, as a means of protecting the losers from global adjustment (a process which, with the end of the cold war, now embraced Russia and the former Soviet Union) and then more decisively, a process which culminated in the Millennium Development Goals. In the 2000s, with the decay of the Washington consensus, the idea of pro-poor orientation becomes incorporated into a more state-dominated politics in a number of middle-income, especially Latin American, countries.

This chapter examines the developmental challenges faced by Bangladesh during the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and how the country attempted to overcome them. The MDGs were conceptualised with the aim of reducing some of the world's major human development challenges by 2015. However, a number of contemporary global challenges, such as economic recession and environmental degradation, made it difficult for some countries to achieve the MDGs by 2015. This was particularly true for the poor and marginalised populations in the Global South. The chapter first provides an overview of the history, achievements and challenges of the MDGs before discussing the challenges within the Bangladesh context, including: a large population, massive poverty, inequality, global environmental changes, weak governance and confrontational politics, politically motivated communal and ethnic violence, weak civil society and unstable economy. It also considers the potential success of the Post-2015 Development Agenda taking into account all future challenges.

This book examines the progress, challenges and lessons of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs were adopted during the 2000 Millennium Summit of the United Nations to address the various dimensions of poverty such as hunger, disease, and exclusion while promoting gender equality, education and environmental sustainability. The book considers whether the MDGs were effective in transforming the narrative around poverty and its many dimensions through multilateral organisations, identifying what worked and what needs to change in the context of the Post-2015 Development Agenda. It also discusses the changing nature of poverty and inequality as well as the role of state and increasingly non-state actors, including civil society groups, in shaping the debate around accountability, progress and inclusiveness. This chapter provides an overview of the impact of globalisation on the MDGs, criticisms of the MDGs, and the Post-2015 Development Agenda. It also explains the purpose and plan for the book.

This chapter examines important lessons for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Nigeria. It first provides a synoptic overview of MDG implementation in Nigeria before discussing the socio-economic and political challenges associated with achieving the MDGs in the country as well as the some of the efforts made by Nigerian governments at different levels to achieve the MDGs in the face of such challenges. It then outlines three major imperatives to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Nigeria by 2030 and concludes with some recommendations for overcoming the current challenges in relation to future poverty reduction and development strategies in the country. The chapter argues that Nigeria made little progress with respect to the MDGs, which were characterised by considerable stasis and undeniable reversals in some parts of the country.

This chapter examines whether the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) provided a concrete background to illuminate the preludes to the Arab Spring by focusing on the experiences of Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. It first considers the common features of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen before discussing the implementation of the MDGs in those countries. It also assesses the effects of the Arab Spring on the MDG progress in each country with respect to indicators such as eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting general equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health and ensuring environmental sustainability. The chapter proceeds by analysing the impact of the Arab Spring on Arab civil society and concludes with an overview of prospects for the Arab world in the post-2015 era.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development brought together an estimated 45,000 participants in Johannesburg, South Africa. The United Nations objectives for the Summit were to review the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development and reinvigorate global commitment to sustainable development. The United Nations Adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (2000), which included commitments to human rights, economic development, and environmental sustainability, provided an important milestone and a series of concrete targets as reference points. The World Trade Organization Doha, Qatar meeting of World Trade Ministers (2001) had launched a new round of trade and economic liberalization negotiations, the “Development Agenda”, and many countries were still seeking to understand the potential impacts and opportunities of these plans for greater economic interdependence. Finally, the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey (2002) had led to concrete commitments for new and additional developed country resources, earmarked for development spending.

When Kofi Annan was elected the first African to head the United Nations in 1997, he faced an organisation that was dysfunctional, had a reputation for being anti-business, and it had little to contribute to the onward march of globalisation. To address these problems, Annan forged a strong alliance with the corporate sector, launching the Global Compact in 2000. This programme encouraged transnational corporations to adopt universal norms of behaviour that had been established through various UN treaties. This programme also allowed Annan to harness the private sector to support his Millennial Development Goals, which was launched the same year. Through it, targets were set to deal with a range of social problems, thereby providing a novel way of coordinating global action between governments, international agencies, nongovernmental organisations, and the corporate sector. By the end of his term, Annan had created a new pathway to global governance, built around norms and measureable targets. The result was greater cooperation between members of the world’s community to solve social and environmental problems. Annan was motivated to establish these alternative programmes to compensate for the entrenched dysfunction within the UN General Assembly.

This chapter focuses on the international goals to improve health and well-being around the world: the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), launched in 2000, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) launched in 2016. The chapter discusses how the MDG framework, which coincided with the movement for HIV treatment access, set new and aspiration targets for improving access to infectious disease treatment, maternal mortality, and child health. The Goals highlighted the need for health systems strengthening to achieve the health improvements promised. The chapter also explains how monies for disease-specific or vertical programs can fragment health systems or, alternatively, can be leveraged to strengthen health care delivery. In 2015, the SDGs were launched with an even broader and more aspirational scope with the explicit goal of achieving Universal Health Coverage by 2030.

This chapter examines the challenges involved in attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Africa in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and highlights important lessons for future financing of global initiatives. The 2008 global financial crisis provided a very important caution: global initiatives are only as good as their global conditions. The crisis had very real consequences for the education sector, particularly through the reduction of adequate funding. The chapter first considers the consequences of the global financial crisis to education, taking into account the role of foreign aid, before discussing the cases of primary education in Ghana and Zimbabwe. It concludes by suggesting some best practices for learning from the failures to education from the 2008 agenda.

This chapter summarizes research on aid allocation and effectiveness, highlighting the current findings of recent research on aid allocation to fragile states. Fragile states are defined by the donor community as those with either critically poor policies or poorly performing institutions, or both. The chapter examines the research findings in the broader context of research and analysis on how aid should and is being allocated across all developing countries. Various aid allocation models and their implications for aid to fragile states are considered. The chapter also looks at types of instruments and their sequencing in fragile states.

The pursuit of global health gains has been one the aims of international development policy for several decades. Along with migration, trade agreements and dominant macroeconomic policies (i.e., neoliberalism), development assistance (aid) is one of the defining elements of contemporary globalization, a noblesse oblige on the part of wealthier nations to support the improvement of lives in poorer, often former colonized, nations. Rarely achieving its stated commitments, and declining since its peak-generosity in the 1960s, aid has been subject to intense disagreements, vacillating between being seen as creating a neocolonial dependency, to arguments for its absolute necessity in saving lives. Since 2000 the aid discourse has been dominated by global development goals, the first set expiring in 2015 (the Millennium Development Goals) and the next and more exhaustive set running until 2030 (the Sustainable Development Goals). Whether these new goals will deliver on their commitments remains an open question.

This chapter describes how social injustice can be reduced by promoting equitable and sustainable human development. It covers requirements for greater social justice in public health. It describes the Millennium Development Goals for poverty reduction and it describes priority actions required of developed countries. The chapter also describes ways in which social injustice can be reduced globally and how sustainable human development can be facilitated. The chapter concludes that actions required for ending social injustice as it affects health go far beyond those of the health sector, and that priority actions extend to many aspects of economic and social policy, nationally and internationally.

This chapter examines disability rights and special needs education as well as the importance of inclusive education in Ethiopia's Oromiya region in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). One of the most important organisations in Oromiya is Christian Horizons-Ethiopia (CH-Ethiopia), an affiliate of Christian Horizons-Global (CH-Global). Since 2004, CH-Global has been working with the Ethiopian government on special needs education (SNE) projects. In 2010 the organisation proposed to build 50,000 primary school spaces for disabled children in Ethiopia. Embedded within the CH-Global proposal is a strong commitment to human rights. The chapter considers CH-Ethiopia's experience to date, set within the context of MDG 2 (which calls for the achievement of universal primary education by 2015), and its partnership with the Ethiopian government, along with the confluence of historical forces since the 1970s that have made that partnership possible.