UNDP Romania - millennium development goals

	Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
	Achieve universal primary education
	Promote gender equality and empower women
	Reduce child mortality
	Improve maternal health
	Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
	Ensure environmental sustainability
	Develop a global partnership for development

In September 2000 the world’s leaders of 192 UN member states, including Romania, adopted the Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to enhance global efforts to reduce poverty, improve health and promote peace, human rights and sustainable environment. The 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that emerged from the Declaration are specific, measurable and time-bound targets, which bind countries to halve severe poverty, widespread hunger, and illiteracy and reduce environmental deterioration and discrimination against women by 2015. All UN nations engaged to work together to achieve the MDGs by 2015, by adapting the goals to country specific development level.

In September 2005 heads of states and governments convened The 2005 World Summit, a high level meeting at the United Nations in New York to reiterate their unambiguous commitment to achieving the MDGs by 2015. The Summit’s Outcome Document noted that each country must take primary responsibility for its own development, and for the establishment of appropriate national policies and development strategies.

In 2010, five years ahead of the 2015 deadline, a progress report by the United Nations (The Millennium Development Goals Report 2010) has found that although there has been clear progress towards implementing the Millennium Development Goals, their overall success is still far from assured. There is a clear need for political leaders to take concerted action, as improvements in the lives of the poor have been unacceptably slow and some hard-won gains are being eroded by the climate, food and economic crises, as the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon stressed.

UNDP links and coordinates global, regional and national efforts to reach the MDGs. Guided by the UN Core Strategy, UNDP works with a wide range of partners to help create coalitions for transformational change, support the goals at global, regional and national levels, benchmark progress towards them, and help countries to build the institutional capacity, policies and programmes needed to attain the MDGs.