The Millennium Project: a plan for meeting the Millennium Development Goals

doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)17791-5

The Lancet

Volume 365, Issue 9456, 22 January 2005, Pages 347-353

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(05)17791-5 Get rights and content

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Practical approaches to achieve the MDGs

This series of essays provides an overview of the practical approaches that UN Millennium Project has identified. The approaches are similar to, and in some cases built directly on, the series of five essays in The Lancet last year on child survival.2, 3, 4, 5, 6 The Lancet studies demonstrated a core truth: there are known packages of effective and generally low-cost interventions in the area of public health that could make a decisive difference to child survival, if access to those

Diagnosis of the shortfall in achieving MDGs

Since the goals were set, the performance across countries has been very mixed. Many parts of the world are making very good progress. Improvements throughout east Asia and south Asia, home to more than half the world's population, have been especially remarkable. However, there are huge disparities. Sub-Saharan Africa is in pervasive crisis, with rising extreme poverty, shockingly high child and maternal mortality, and a trajectory that has many of the countries failing to meet most of the

Identifying key interventions and policies

If governance is adequate, the key to achieving the MDGs is therefore a scaling up of investments in targeted sectors and regions. The key lesson from The Lancet series on child survival and from the UN Millennium Project task forces is that sound, proven, cost-effective interventions indeed exist that can ameliorate, and often eliminate, the underlying causes of extreme poverty. Some real breakthroughs are possible, if the existing technologies can be implemented, at scale, in the poorest

Creation of national-level processes for scaling up

The UN Millennium Project's core operational recommendation is that every developing country with extreme poverty should adopt and implement a national development strategy that is ambitious enough to achieve the MDGs. The country's international development partners—including bilateral donors, UN agencies, regional development banks, and the Bretton Woods institutions—should give all the technical and financial support needed to implement the country's strategy. In particular, official

Mobilisation of global science

Advances in science and technology allow society to mobilise new sources of energy and materials, fight disease, produce crops, assemble and disseminate information, transport people and goods with greater speed and safety, restrict family size as desired, and much more. But these technologies are not free. They are the fruits of enormous social investments in education, scientific discovery, and targeted technological projects. Every successful high-income country makes special public

Global costs and benefits

How much will the goals cost to achieve? What share of total costs can be borne through increased domestic resources, and what must be provided by donors? These questions can be properly answered only through detailed needs assessments that must be undertaken at the country level. As a first attempt, the UN Millennium Project collaborated with local research organisations to prepare MDG needs assessments for five countries to quantify infrastructure, human resource, and financial needs. We

The importance of 2005

If the MDGs are to be met, 2005 must bring a major increase in effort. Fortunately, two world leaders, the UK's Tony Blair and France's Jacques Chirac, building on a far-thinking plan of Gordon Brown, the British Chancellor, have promised exactly that. They have pledged to make 2005 a breakthrough year, especially at the G8 summit, to be hosted by the UK in Scotland in July. To lay the groundwork, President Chirac commissioned Jean-Pierre Landau to report on the financing mechanisms for