Eliminating Extreme Inequality: A Sustainable Development Goal, 2015–2030
Michael W. Doyle and Joseph E. Stiglitz | March 20, 2014
At the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000, UN member states took a dramatic step by putting people rather than states at the center of the UN’s agenda. In their Millennium Declaration,*1 the assembled world leaders agreed to a set of breathtakingly broad goals touching on peace through development, the environment, human rights, the protection of the vulnerable, the special needs of Africa, and reforms of UN institutions. Particularly influential was the codification of the Declaration’s development related objectives, which emerged in the summer of 2001 as the now familiar eight Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs), to be realized by 2015:
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.3
• Halve the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day and those who suffer from hunger.
2. Achieve universal primary education.
• Ensure that all boys and girls complete primary school.
3. Promote gender equality and empower women.
• Eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015.
4. Reduce child mortality.
• Reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under five
in full: http://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2014/eliminating-extreme-inequality-a-sustainable-development-goal-2015-2030/