The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG)

Millennium Development Goals (MDG)

• End Poverty & Hunger
• Universal Education
• Gender Equality
• Child Health
• Maternal Health
• Combat HIV/AIDS
• Environmental Sustainability
• Global Partnership

Welcome to the 21st Century

The United Nations convened a Millennium Summit, 6-8 September 2000, eight years ago. The summit was the flowing together of streams of thought which had been around for a long while. It became a meeting of the minds and highest ideals for human progress in the 21st Century.

Thus ten days later, on 18 September 2000, in the Fifty-fifth session of the General Assembly, resolution 55/2 was adopted: the United Nations Millennium Declaration (pdf).

This nine-page document expressed the values and principles, and specific goals which were desired to be achieved during this new millennium of human existence. Then again, it was only passed by the U.N. General Assembly, and who listens to them anyway, right? I mean, it’s only the United Nations. Feh. Who cares?

Thus five years later, from 14-16 September 2005, they got together the 2005 World Summit. This was a forum for 170 heads of state and governments. You’d hope people would listen to the assembly of the leaders of the vast majority of the nations on Earth, right?

Maybe. If you haven’t heard or thought of these goals before, maybe the time to start is right now.

Please Care

Kofi Annan said thusly, and one can still read on the 2005 World Summit page:

The 2005 World Summit is a one-in-a-generation opportunity for the world to come together to take action on grave global threats that require bold global solutions.

It is also a chance to revitalize the United Nations itself.
It is, in short, an opportunity for all humankind.

What have we done with the past three years in response to this opportunity? For my own part, I travelled to Croatia to see what causes global conflict, examining the wars of independence in the West Balkans as a starting point to understand the drives for violent conflict. Later in 2006-2007, I worked on Wikipedia to record the war and the peacemaking in Somalia and East Africa, and recorded in great detailed articles various issues regarding the clash of cultures between the Islamic and western worlds, and created charts about Energy Intensity.

This year, in August, I began the Global Understanding Institute, and joined Karl John to form the international Global Understanding movement. Others are joining the discourse and now people are pro-actively contacting me. My personal thanks to the support and friendship of Jeffery Tibbets, Franklin Pham, Carlos Suarez, Harshi Lanjewar, Michael Walsh, Steve Alston, Robert Narkun (Czycz), and others. If your name is not specifically mentioned here, you have my apologies for my oversight. Speak up and add your name below to the cause! Some have also offered help, but wish not to be publicly identified at this time.

Those who joined support this cause instinctively, intuitively, with their intelligence and with specific intent to address the critical issues of this moment, in our time on Earth. Thus we have collectively committed ourselves for the sake of my fellow.

I’ll be bringing up more about the MDGs in the days ahead. The GU Institute fully supports these goals. They are just the “top tier” of problems facing humankind today. Even “solving” these issues may cause unintended harm, produce unexpected consequences and unleash other problems. So we must be quite careful for what we ask, and how we wish to see our future evolve.

For now, please give me your feedback on the Millennium Development Goals. How would you sort-order them in terms of priority? Which do you believe you are already helping to address? How specifically do you do so? If you could add only one more cause to the list, what would it be?