Title: The MDGs and the Sub Saharan Africa the quest of development?
Description: The MDGs: which partnership?
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), derived from the world summits and conferences of the 1990s, were adopted by 189 nations in the Millennium Declaration in September 2000 at United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York with amid great fanfare to adopt the MDGs. Global targets were set to help mobilise political commitment and to provide benchmarks for measuring progress in promoting human development and poverty reduction. As a universally agreed agenda, MDGs brought unprecedented clarity to the individual and collective roles and responsibilities of all development parties: governments, civil society organisations, foundations and the private sector. As such, they did provided an overarching operating framework for the UN system’s development work and the major multilateral partners, including the Bretton Woods Institutions.
The MDGs being global benchmarks for tackling poverty within a specified time frame have been widely accepted as a framework for measuring development progress. They were expected to bring about significant, measurable and sustainable improvements in the lives of people across the world. They aim to arrest the growing tide of poverty especially in the least developing countries (LDCs), and therefore countries were expected to be active at national levels while developed countries also have a corresponding obligation to ensure an international environment conducive to development. Developed countries have to focus on stimulating action on aid, trade, debt relief, new technologies and investment flows. But more importantly, appropriate policies and frameworks have to be developed that can adequately support the realisation of the MDGs in the most cost effective manner.