Can the goals work?
Can the goals work?
Progress
Click on the links below and find out more about the good news and progress towards achieving the MDGs
The Millennium Development Goals....the Good News!
Though there is still much to do, significant progress has been made towards achieving the MDGs, especially since 2002. This powerpoint presentation is a good news resource outlining international progress, national achievements, as well as campaign successes.
- MDGs Monitoring Tool
This tool allows you to track the progress of the MDGs through country-specific profiles. Learn about current national challenges and achievements. - New Gender and MDGs Progress Factsheet
Women disproportionately suffer from hunger, disease, environmental degradation and impoverishment. As a result, poverty remains stubbornly “feminized”, with women accounting for a vast percentage of the world’s absolute poor. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, this publication from the Millennium Campaign highlights the interconnectedness of women’s issues to all of the Millennium Development Goals.
The Millennium Declaration set 2015 as the target date for achieving most of the Goals. There is progress being made on all the goals. The results are predictably uneven but there has been some visible and widespread gains. Encouragingly, the report suggests that some progress is being made even in those regions where the challenges are greatest demonstrating success is possible, but also indicating the MDGs will be attained only if concerted additional action is taken immediately and sustained until 2015.
The information below allows you to explore more deeply the progress being made on the MDGs:
Tackling poverty south and north!
Micah Challenge is widely acknowledged because it is building the political will needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, by mobilizing constituencies that could tip the political balance in key countries.
The Millennium Development Goals are a compact between high income countries and the international financial institutions (termed the 'global north'), and low income countries (termed the 'global south'). Southern leaders have promised to deliver all dimensions of good governance required to achieve the targets for hunger and absolute poverty, primary education, infant and maternal health, gender inequality, HIV/AIDs and other diseases, and environmental sustainability (Goals 1-7). Northern leaders have promised to deliver finance for development, a fairer trade regime and technology transfer (Goal 8).
It is widely agreed that the MDGs are a 'stretching', but economically and technically achievable roadmap to halve poverty by 2015. They have become the backbone for national poverty reduction plans, and for bilateral and multilateral aid and development negotiations.
Political will is built by active citizenship. Micah Challenge is turning heads because it is engaging Christians in active citizenship on both sides of this south-north equation. At June 2009, Micah Challenge has 41 campaigns. The nuts and bolts of their work is, firstly, to challenge the Christian community, from local church to national church leadership, to be transformed by the Word of God and by deeper engagement with impoverished and marginalized communities, and secondly to adopt the Millennium Development Goals as a lens, and as a lever, for critical engagement with the political and business leadership of their country.
Is this strategy working?
The cases below illustrate the capacity and enormous potential of churches to mobilize citizens and create the conditions in which governments will be more accountable and will use economic growth to reduce poverty. They indicate massive returns on investment at three levels: increased resource flows from the global north to the global south; better governance indicated by delivery of effective services to the poorest communities, and: increases in the numbers of children, women and men living fuller and more secure lives.
Micah Challenge Zambia
In 2006, local churches organized by the Jubilee Centre (leading Micah Challenge) in the copper-belt region of Zambia engaged their, normally absent, parliamentarians in workshops on HIV/AIDs. Within three weeks, as a direct result of this practical, prayerful approach to advocacy, availability of anti-retroviral treatment in the district of Mwinulunga rose by 43%! In a second church-led strategy, communities across the copper-belt region got pre-poll contracts from candidates before the recent national elections that will help to guarantee that election promises to achieve the MDGs in the region will be delivered.
Micah Challenge Malawi
The global Stand-Up Against Poverty organized by the UN Millennium Campaign in 2006, to promote the MDGs and continue pressure on governments to meet the targets, was the second largest social action in history, involving 23 million people, just short of the 24 million who signed the Jubilee Debt Campaign petition. For Stand-Up, as for the Jubilee Debt petition, church networks played a enormous part in mobilizing participation. The Africa MDG News recorded that, "The Malawi Campaign worked in conjunction with Micah Challenge and organized Stand Up Moments in churches and schools that produced 1,500,027 people standing against poverty."
Micah Challenge Australia
Micah Challenge Australia's mobilization of churches in the constituencies of influential Christian members of Government, underpinned the Government's decision in 2005 to increase annual overseas aid by 1.5 billion Australian dollars by 2010. Subsequent lobbying by Micah Challenge has also played a part in getting the opposition party to promise ahead of elections in 2007, that it will lift overseas aid to 5% of GDP. One of Micah Challenge's contributions to the broader Make Poverty History campaign in Australia is that it engages more middle and conservative voters than other organizations within the movement. The views of these communities can be less easily dismissed by the political parties. Micah Challenge worldwide is part of the white band movement (Global Call to Action Against Poverty) and contributes globally in a similar way.
Micah Challenge USA
Engagement of evangelical Christian leaders in the USA in lobbying before the World Summit in 2005 contributed to an about turn in the negative stance the Administration had originally taken towards the Summit and the MDGs. The President made his first public statement of commitment to the MDGs giving campaigners a much better platform for lobbying. Micah Challenge USA has continued work to engage influential evangelical Christian leaders. MCUSA will co-host a US-global south forum on October 11-12, 2007 in Washington, featuring dialogue between Christian in leaders and the UN Secretary General.