Published 16 September 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a1692
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a1692

News

World still faces big challenges in meeting millennium development goals, says UN

John Zarocostas

1 Geneva

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The world has made major progress to reduce extreme poverty but won’t fulfil the United Nations’ eight millennium development goals by 2015, a UN report says. Sustained efforts are needed to ensure that advances in combating hunger, child mortality, and HIV and AIDS and other diseases are maintained, it says.

"The economic slowdown will diminish the incomes of the poor; the food crisis will raise the number of hungry people in the world and push millions more into poverty; climate change will have a disproportionate impact on the poor," said Ban Ki-moon, the UN’s secretary general, in the report’s foreword.

The mid-term assessment of progress says that the number of people living in absolute poverty has fallen from 1.8 billion to 1.4 billion, and it estimates that the 1990 global poverty rate is likely to be halved by 2015.

But it says that aggregate data "mask large disparities among regions" . . . [Full text of this article]


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