Millennium development goals

Leaders from around the world established eight development goals till the year 2015 based on United Nations Millennium declaration that was adopted in the summit of United Nations in 2000. All the member states of United Nations (189 member states at that time and 193 now) and more than twenty organizations resolved to achieve these goals.

Goals

The eight goals about which we talked are as follows.

1) Eradication of poverty and hunger.

2) Achieving uniform primary education for all regions.

3)Promotion of Gender equality and women empowerment.

4) Significant reduction in child deaths.

5) improvement in the health of mothers worldwide.

6) To eradicate fatal diseases like Polio, Aids, and Malaria etc.

7) Ensuring sustainability and protection of the environment.

8) Achieving development through a worldwide partnership.

                                      Pakistan’s efforts in this regard

Pakistan was quite at a distance from achieving these goals and now another declaration has resulted in new goals called “SDS” or Sustainable development goals. First of all, if we talk about poverty reduction then it has been a complete failure for Pakistan in wake of terrorism, poor governance, corruption, insecurity and to add, our country was hit badly by calamities during that period. Still today a quarter of our population lives below the line of extreme hunger and poverty.

Now if we talk about the second goal, that has improved somewhat but is no way near to what we wanted to achieve. The more stressed or focused area from the government and international NGOs had been Women empowerment, it has seen some improvements but still, women have to face discrimination in all sectors adding worst nightmares of rape cases, handing over of women to enemies to settle dispute called “Swara” etc. Sind had been the province that was on the top of the list in terms of achieving women empowerment.

All the provinces equate each other in terms of dismal performance that was ought to show the reduction in child mortality. None of the provinces had been able to achieve that goal and was no way near to it. Same is the case with goal dealing with the mother’s health where all the provinces had shown worst performance. There has been some progress on the goal number 6 with free vaccination for Polio, Aids and other diseases at the doorstep of poor people but still, Pakistan lags far behind.

Pakistan had been included in very few countries globally that still facing Polio cases. As for as the Millennium development goal number 7 is concerned, there has been some improvement in the KP (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) province but rest of the country has shown poor performance.

The last development goal was of prime importance because of the economic problems that had been faced by developing countries and are still being faced by these countries. The main aim of this development goal was to move towards achieving the above-mentioned milestones through the financial and technical help of the developed world. The developed countries had been bound to provide donations to the organizations and countries that were striving towards achieving these goals.

Though there had been massive funds to be offered by the developed nations but without proper planning to properly utilize them. Most of the money went into military aid and debt relaxation and the rest was depleted by corruption. Same is the case with Pakistan where corruption is a big problem hindering us from what we can achieve. Pakistan was able to achieve only 8 indicators while still lagging in 24 till the closing of the time frame of these goals. So, much effort is needed in order to able to achieve future goals.