Millennium Development Goals

Hello,

Since we are all off for break, I figured what better time to educate ourselves a bit more about the major issues troubling our world today. Also I believe actually knowing what's going on may inspire an idea or motivate us all to do more.

To do this I'm going to use the forums on our website as a medium for discussion and I'll pick a topic each week which will hopefully generate some discussion.

For the first topic I've chosen the Millennium Development Goals(MGD's), which have now become sort of a scale to judge how well global development efforts are doing. Over the past 5 years it has become clear that many developing countries will be unable to meet this goals. However the steps that have been taken since the laying out of this goals has surely made progress in improving the quality of life in some developing countries. The MGD's were layed out to make the point that if we make a global effort we CAN help the worlds poor, but in their failure will they undermine this cause?

Here are some websites and articles for more knowledge and reference. Please post your comments or questions in the forum:

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

http://www.bread.org/learn/background-papers/2005/Achieving-the-Millennium-Development-Goals-What-It-Will-Take.pdf

http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/352/2/115

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001967.html

http://www.greenbiz.com/news/reviews_third.cfm?NewsID=28805

If you have any good articles or have an interesting topic in mind please email me (mmir2 [at] uiuc [dot] edu)!