APRIL 2005

Launching a New Era: 
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

Message from Joan Holmes, President of The Hunger Project and member of the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force.

On January 17, 2005, I was honored to be at the UN for the official launching of the action plan, "Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals" (MDGs). This action plan has now been launched in 120 countries. The action plan to achieve the MDGs is a bold initiative that refuses to accept hunger as inevitable. it is deigned to cut poverty and hunger in half by 2015--and to end these conditions altogether within the coming years.

The MDGs are the world's time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions--income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and discrimination--while promoting gender equality, education and environmental sustainability.

This initiative launched a whole new era in human development.  This is the first time that our community of nations has come together to create a unified plan of action to solve the basic issues facing humankind.

Given our commitment to play a catalytic role at the cutting edge of ending hunger, the launching of this strategy marks a new era for The Hunger Project.  We totally and unequivocally support the MDGs and the unified global strategy they call forth.  We are aligned with these goals and will do everything possible to ensure that they are met.

This era will require that all of us in The Hunger Project take on a new level of global citizenship, and a new level of clarity, focus, commitment and investment.  I invite you to seriously engage with the MDGs and the strategy to achieve them.  And I invite you to step forward boldly to invest in The Hunger Project as we play a leadership role for their achievement. --Joan Holmes

 

Pioneering Strategies to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals

In September 2000, the leaders of 189 nations committed to achieve specific results by 2015 in eight major areas that have come to be known as the “Millennium Development Goals.” Here are the key targets for 2015 and highlights of the numerous cutting-edge, large-scale strategies pioneered by The Hunger Project to empower people to achieve the MDGs.

	Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. To reduce by half the proportion of people living under $1 per day. At our epicenters across Africa, thousands of women food farmers are increasing their incomes through training, credit, and strengthening their clout in the marketplace.   To reduce by half the proportion of children who are malnourished. In six of the poorest states of Mexico, we have mobilized people to grow vegetables, build greenhouses and introduce other farm innovations resulting in better nutrition.
	Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education. Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling. Across Bangladesh, Hunger Project animators carry out mass mobilizations to ensure 100% school registration of girls, and campaigns to reduce drop-out rates.
	Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women. Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015.   The Hunger Project goes beyond this target by empowering women as the key change agents for the end of hunger.  In Peru last year, we brought together indigenous women leaders from across Latin America to create a shared platform of action, including the commitment to train young women as the leaders of tomorrow.
	Goal 4: Reduce child mortality. Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate. By establishing health centers and pre-school nutrition programs at our African epicenters, more than 1000 villages have dramatically reduced  child mortality.
	Goal 5: Improve maternal health. Reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio.  More than 25,000 women elected representatives trained by The Hunger Project in India work to improve the primary health centers and ensure that all women receive pre- and post-natal care.
	Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases. Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, and the incidence of malaria and other diseases, by 2015.   Across Africa, more than 280,000 villagers have taken the HIV/AIDS and Gender Inequality workshops. THP-Malawi has carried out successful campaigns to have villagers use bed nets to prevent Malaria.
	Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability. Cut by half the proportion of people without safe drinking water in rural areas and the proportion of people without sanitation in rural areas. In Bangladesh, The Hunger Project created a national coalition to stop industrial pollution of the air and water supply.
	Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for Development. Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, nondiscriminatory trading and financial system.   Deal comprehensively with the debt problem. While these are actions which must be taken by governments, Hunger Project investors are a microcosm of the spirit which will be required. Hunger Project investors do not see themselves as “donors” but as co-equal partners with hungry people to create a better future for all humanity.

.

2005 – The “Make or Break Year” for the MDGs

The MDGs call for an unprecedented partnership.  Wealthy countries have committed to make trade more free and fair, implement debt relief, especially for Africa, and significantly increase development assistance. Developing countries have committed to make poverty reduction a budget priority, reduce corruption, expand effective programs, open up to new science and technology, and implement participatory democracy.

The year 2005 is widely seen as a make-or-break year for the MDGs. Development is higher on the international agenda than it has been in decades. Nations must take decisive action this year in order to achieve the MDGs by 2015.

The Role of The Hunger Project

• Pioneering a unified approach: The Hunger Project has long recognized that the global conferences of the 1990s – from the 1990 World Summit for Children through the World Food Summit of 1996 – reflected steps towards addressing one, interlinked nexus of issues. Only by resolving the entire nexus of issues can we resolve any of them. All of our programs are based on a unified approach.
• Pioneering strategies on the ground: For the past 15 years, The Hunger Project has developed large-scale, people-centered, women-focused strategies that have proven effective for achieving the MDGs in rural communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
• Participation in the Hunger Task Force: As the sole member of the Hunger Task Force with experience in grassroots mobilization and gender issues, Joan Holmes was effective in ensuring that these two critical areas were addressed in the Task Force report.
• Leadership for achieving the goals: The unified, global strategy to achieve the MDGs will require bold, unprecedented action by wealthy and developing nations. The Hunger Project mobilizes committed, effective leadership at every level of society – from grassroots animators at the village level, to training elected local officials, to our national and state advisory councils, to Joan’s work at the international level. This year, we are aligning all our leadership to focus on achieving the MDGs.
• A strategic capacity for what’s next: When you invest in The Hunger Project, you invest in the “research and development” capacity to analyze trends and opportunities, and develop cutting-edge interventions. As we launch this new era, we don’t yet know all the issues we will face or the interventions we will need – but we know we must have a capacity up to the challenge.
• Our Fall Event this year will be “The MDGs and The Hunger Project: A Global Citizen’s Briefing” on October 22 at the New York Hilton.  That afternoon, we will hold a Policy Forum that delineates the entire policy framework through discussions by senior people in key areas like democracy, hunger, and HIV/AIDS. At the Evening Gala, we will be showcase The Hunger Project’s groundbreaking contributions to the achievement of the MDGs.

 

Launching the New Era, Investing in this New Era

You and I are alive at a time of unprecedented opportunity to bring our voices, our power and out money to bear on the most vital issues facing humankind.  With all 189 member states of the United Nations standing for the delivery of the MDGs, the world is now poised to make dramatic inroads in some of our most pernicious problems--hunger, poverty, gender inequality, child mortality and the spread of HIV/AIDS. 

The Hunger Project has been on the cutting edge of addressing these issues for years. Our strategies are visible and successful. It is on the shoulders of this success that we are now giving ourselves the mandate to play a leadership role in having humanity achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Our investment will expand our current programs, which empower millions of people. It will also give us the freedom to develop new initiatives to meet the challenges of this new era.

It will enable us to develop accurate, incisive and timely research and analysis, which will support Joan and our country directors in their ever more public role as leaders for the achievement of the MDGs.

Expanded financial capacity will increase our reach and influence in policy circles and open up more opportunities for effective collaboration with governments, nongovernmental organizations and global institutions.

Finally, our investment will allow The Hunger Project to promote the primary importance of two key issues that are largely missing in the prevailing policy discussions:  the empowerment of women and the mobilization of people's self-reliance. 

If ever there was a time when making a bold commitment with our money could change the course of the future, the time is now.