UN replaces millennium poverty plan with sustainable development goals
Promise to world's poor in the ambitious Millennium Development Goals is being reshaped after it becomes obvious it has not achieved its targets
When a handful of technocrats from the world's most advanced nations gathered in a UN basement in 2000 to establish global development goals, their objective seemed simply to create a blueprint to help the world's poor by 2015.
But as the deadline nears and many targets remain to be met, the UN is shifting from what it once hailed as the world's ambitious, unwavering promise to the world's poor, known as the Millennium Development Goals, to a more inclusive, participatory and sophisticated approach of the Sustainable Development Goals.
These new goals, which are to be finalised by the General Assembly in the summer, attempt to revise the previous ones by involving more global leaders and seeking to align national priorities with international goals, rather than imposing international goals on countries with widely varying needs and resources.
"We are no longer living in a G20 world. We're living in a G0 world," said Paul Ladd, who leads the UN development programme's team on the post-2015 development agenda.
This shift has reignited a debate in the world of international development on whether common goals can even drive development.
The eight Millennium Development Goals, designed to form a blueprint for international development, have had mixed results. Extreme poverty and global child mortality rates have been halved from their 1990 levels, but progress has been uneven between regions and countries, especially in health and education. In some parts of Africa, measures of health standards have declined.