Millennium Development Goals

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (the MDGs) are eight goals that UN Member States agreed to try to achieve by the year 2015.

The MDGs – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions. The goals have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have produced the most successful anti-poverty movement in history and serve as the jumping-off point for the new sustainable development agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals, that was adopted in 2015.

The review of the MDGs found that the 15-year effort to achieve the eight aspirational goals set out in the Millennium Declaration in 2000 was largely successful across the globe while acknowledging shortfalls that remain.