Global Development Goals—What did we get right & where do we go?
By Jillian SlutzkerSeptember 15, 2015
Since 1990, the rate of people living in extreme poverty has been halved. Primary school enrollment in developing countries now averages 91 percent. Women’s participation in parliaments has doubled. The Millennium Development Goals, on many measures, have been a success.
In 2000, the United Nations and global development institutions agreed to this set of eight goals to be reached by 2015—from achieving universal primary education to improving maternal health and ensuring environmental sustainability.
As world leaders gear up at the end of September for the next generation of development milestones—the Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDGs)—Creative’s experts are weighing in on successes, missteps and critical ingredients to ramp up growth and prosperity for the world’s 7.3 billion residents.
What did the world get right?
And what does everyone need to do in order to build more prosperous, inclusive, stable and sustainable communities during the next 15 years?
In the past, poverty was extreme poverty, and so the urgency of the Millennium Development Goals was to encourage people to understand the breadth of extreme poverty and the segregation of gender issues. What we got right is that we brought that to the developed world’s attention in a way that brought action.
What we did wrong is that we did not make a good assessment of extreme poverty and conflict, and how easy it is for a fragile state and parts of its population to slide into extreme poverty out of conflict. There were no processes and procedures to support that.
Now, the issue of humanitarian relief and conflict and development support is being looked at from a more holistic point of view, and the goals are considered more holistically.
Charito Kruvant, Creative Co-founder and CEO
Click below to see what our experts said.
