Achieving the Millennium Development Goals

Roy Brown

At the Millennium Summit in September 2000 the 189 member states of the United Nations reaffirmed their commitment to sustainable development and the elimination of poverty and pledged to meet a set of quantifiable goals, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), by the year 2015. The goals cover:

· The eradication of extreme poverty and hunger

· Universal primary education

· Gender equality and the empowerment of women

· Child mortality

· Maternal health

· Combating HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases

· Environmental sustainability

· A global partnership for development

But with a plethora of challenges all competing for funding, which are the priorities? What kinds of development are most cost-effective and will have lasting impact? And how do we measure progress in development?

Roy Brown's paper addresses these questions, and highlights the key role that women's development: education, primary health care and, in particular, reproductive health care will have in the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

Roy Brown

Roy Brown is President of IHEU. He has been a longtime active Humanist and advocate of family planning, abortion rights, voluntary euthanasia, and human rights generally.

In 1987 while living in the Netherlands he founded, with his wife Diana, the World Population Foundation, a Dutch non-governmental organization working to raise awareness of the human, social and environmental problems connected with rapid population growth. WPF is now the leading European NGO in the field of population and reproductive rights and health. Roy served as chairman of WPF for 10 years. Roy is a life member of the British Humanist Association. Roy believes that Humanism must be more than a passive philosophy of life. As President he aims to persuade our member organizations, particularly those in the west, to engage with their fellow Humanists in developing countries and to help them in their struggles against poverty, oppression, ignorance and disease.

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