Has progress been made in achieving the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)?

2015, the deadline of Millennium Development Goals, at this year new goals Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) being set for us to achieve before the year 2030. However, there are many of goals in SDGs are extremely similar to ones in MDGs, this means there are goals being set in MDGs have not been achieved between the year 2000 and 2015, but it does not mean there's no progress being made. The question is how mush has been achieved between the year 2000 and 2015. Is there any goals have not been achieved, with little improvements being made, or exceed the goal. Here it will evaluate how much and is there any progress being made to achieve the UN MDGs. In terms of poverty, education, and health.

According to the data collected by the UN, number of people living in the extreme poverty declined more than a half. From 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in the year of 2015. Number of people working more than $4/day has almost tripled from 1991. For example in India in 1990, Poverty Head Count Ratio(PHCR) estimate was 47.8%, achieved 21.9% in 2011-2013, which is below the target. (Target:23.9%) However country such as Tanzania, according to their annual report, the progress towards achieving are small which will not allow the country to achieve the goal. This may due to some other factors and incident in the country during that time period.

Education on the other hand, enrolment of primary student has increased from 83% in 2000 to 91% in 2015. Primary students not being able to attend primary school reduced from 100 million to 57 million. Big progress being made especially in Zambia, within the 4 years from 2005 to 2009 they successfully increased the student enrolment from 2.5 million to 3.3 million. However, in most of the Sub-Saharan African countries, not much of progress been made, or even got worse due to enormous of wars within Africa.

In terms of health lots of progress being made, under 5 mortality rate being reduced by almost 50% from 99% in 1990 to 53% in 2012, which is beyond target, target was to reduce by 2/3. However when it comes to maternal health, globally it failed to achieve the goal reduce maternal mortality ratio to less than 75%. Still, there are progress been made. For example, in Central African Republic number of maternal deaths reduced from 1290 in the year 1990 to 882 in the year 2000. Although there was increase in maternal deaths from the year 2014, but still over all maternal health have been improved since 1990.

To what extent the progress of MDGs been made? All three, poverty, education, and health has been improved for sure, poverty and education has been improved the most. Health on the other hand have little progress towards achieving the goal. One of the possible reason that health didn't improve as much as the other two, may be that people values something other than health more. Which may be correlates to poverty and education, more educated the people are, more they values their health, having more knowledge about healthcare. To conclude to see a huge progress in health, it may requires higher education.