"The HIV & HCV Education Projects has joined with the University of Queensland's United Nations Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) Project, which is part of the UQ Medical Program. The UNMDG Project fosters recognition of global health, and encourages achievement of the UNMDGs. Click here for more information.

Against a background of growing global partnerships and commitments from the world summits of the 1990s, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and their measurable targets and indicators, were set in 2000. The United Nations adopted the MDGs to coordinate large scale global development, by the 2015 deadline.

Health occupies centre stage in the MDGs. If health professionals better understand the MDGs, they can contribute to improving the lives of many people around the world.

The 8 Millennium Development Goals

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
   • Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day
   • Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people
   • Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
   • Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
   • Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015
4. Reduce child mortality
   • Reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five
5. Improve maternal health
   • Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio
   • Achieve, by 2015, universal access to reproductive health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
   • Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS
   • Achieve, by 2010, universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it
   • Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
   • Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs; reverse loss of environmental resources
   • Reduce bio diversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss
   • Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water
   • Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020
8. A global partnership for development
   • Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system
   • Address the special needs of the least developed countries
   • Address the special needs of landlocked developing countries and small island developing States
   • Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries through national and international measures in order to make debt sustainable in the long term
   • In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries
   • In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications