On October 17th, Harvard School of Public Health featured a post, Researchers To Examine the Impact of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, about a group of researchers who are exploring the impact of the Millennium Development Goals, with a close look at the implications of the inclusion of certain goals and the exclusion of other goals.
From the post:
In fact, say researchers Alicia Ely Yamin and Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, the MDGs’ focus on primary education effectively relegated some other worthy educational goals to the back burner, where they received less support—and less funding. Likewise, the other MDGs—aimed at addressing problems including poverty and hunger, maternal health, and child health—while admirable, also had unintended effects of marginalizing some issues that weren’t specifically mentioned in the list.
“One of the powerful things about the MDGs is that they set very specific goals, like cutting the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day by half, or reducing maternal mortality ratios by 75%,” said Fukuda-Parr. “These are all very important priorities and no one would disagree with them. But there are many other global goals that are important. So we need to ask, ‘What did the MDGs leave out?’ ”
Yamin, lecturer on global health in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Director of the Health Rights of Women and Children Program at HSPH’s François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights, and Fukuda-Parr, professor in the international affairs program at the New School in New York, are leading a group of 17 researchers in the international development and human rights communities in examining the consequences—both intended and unintended—of the MDGs.
Read the full post here.