All of the organizations and strategies described above have come together in the push to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In September 2000, the leaders of 189 countries met at United Nations headquarters in New York to participate in the UN Millennium Summit. At the conclusion of the meeting, members agreed to the UN Millennium Declaration, which laid out the MDGs as guides for the UN in the years to come, as shown in the box below. They are intended to be part of a "compact" between poor nations and rich nations, ensuring that rich will devote resources to helping poor countries develop if the poor make their own efforts to reform their countries to make the assistance work effectively and efficiently.

Millennium Development Goals Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger Achieve universal primary education Promote gender equality and empower women Reduce child mortality Improve maternal health Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases Ensure environmental sustainability Develop a global partnership for development Source: United Nations

Along with the goals, the international community set 18 specific targets to meet to fufill the goal and related indicators by which to measure achievement toward meeting the targets and goals. For example, one target is to halve the number of people in the world living in hunger, as measured by, among other factors, the proportion of children under five years of age who are underweight.

Another target is to integrate sustainable development principles into developing countries' policies, as measured by, among other factors, the amount of forestland and the amount of land preserved for biological diversity purposes. A third target is making information technologies available to wider sector of the world's population, as measured by the percentage of people with access to personal computers, the Internet, and telephones.

The targets, as measured by a set of indicators, will be a crucial yardstick by which world leaders will be able to judge to what extent their development efforts are working. They also will help organizations like the World Bank and UNDP produce a more concrete vision of what they want to accomplish over the years to come and hopefully enhance their ability to convince governments to give them the funds needed to accomplish the goals.

Can the world actually achieve the Millennium Development Goals by the year 2015? According to the UN, $110 billion in additional development assistance per year will be needed in 2015, about 2.7 what had been given in 2002.¹ According to the UN Development Program, the only region that has made reasonably positive progress toward the goals has been Eastern and Southeastern Asia, which has 1.5 times less of extreme poverty² and dramatically reduced hunger rates since 1990. Other regions, though, such as Latin America, have shown little progress, and some even regressed. Poverty has worsened steadily in sub Saharan Africa and in Western Asia, for example.³

In 2009, past the halfway point to the 2015 goal, progress in the eradication of poverty and hunger have “slowed or reversed as a result of the global economic and food crises.  The 2009 progress report concludes that most goals will not be met by 2015.⁴   It seems that much work remains to be done, and the hope is that with greater efforts from both developing and developed countries on their compact, progress toward the Millennium Development Goals will improve as the global economy returns to a more stable state.