Ending Hunger in America, 2014 Hunger Report Full Report | Page 162

Why the Millennium Development Goals Matter

UN Photo/David Ohana

U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon (center) walks
with President Barack
Obama outside the 37th
G8 Summit in Deauville,
France, in May 2011.

Global poverty is now falling with unprecedented speed. More people escaped poverty
during the 2000s than in any other decade in history. Even more importantly, progress was
made in every major region of the world. According to the World Bank, the percentage
of people living below the international poverty line ($1.25 per
person per day) has fallen already
by more than half since 1990; the
MDG target of cutting poverty in
half by 2015 has been reached.1
Accelerating this progress and
reaching those left behind should
be the focus of a post-2015 development framework.
The MDGs are the global community’s most holistic approach yet
to human development. Since they
were set in 2000, the MDGs have
become embedded in national
development strategies; they also
provide a framework for international donor agencies to align their
support.2 In the 2000s, as more aid
became available to help achieve
the MDGs, the resources dedicated to tracking progress also increased—with far-reaching
improvements in accountability.3 “Although it seems obvious today to track progress on
intended targets,” says Todd Moss of the Center for Global Development in Washington,
DC, “common practice in the past was simply to calculate inputs: how much money was
spent, how many books were bought, etc., rather than on the hoped-for changes in countries,
such as healthier and more educated people. In fact, the approach of finding out how we are
actually doing is obvious now in part because of the [MDGs].”4
Perhaps the greatest contribution of the MDGs is their role in encouraging the emergence
of a new international social norm. The MDGs provided a lens to focus public attention. In
the words of David Hulme and James Scott of the University of Manchester in the United
Kingdom, they succeeded in “showing extreme poverty as morally unacceptable in an affluent
world.”5 The MDGs have a fair share of critics, and they are certainly not perfect. But the

$3.5 trillion:
the economic cost of malnutrition, equal to 5 percent
of global Gross Domestic Product.1

152? Chapter 5

n

Bread for the World Institute

34 countries are home
to 90 percent of the
world’s children stunted
by malnutrition.2