Millennium development goals are under threat from financial crisis

The global economic crisis is pushing many poor nations, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, into a danger zone and poses a serious threat that many of the United Nations’ millennium development goals will not be met by the 2015 target date. The prospects are gravest for goals related to health, warns a report by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, warned that the financial crisis risks becoming “a human and social crisis.”

“The prospects of reaching the MDGs [millennium development goals] by 2015, already a cause for serious concern, now look even more distant,” the two agency chiefs observed. They emphasised that international efforts “must be …