Track the Millennium Development Goals

You will no doubt have heard of the eight anti-poverty UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but do you know, if we are making progress towards those goals? While I might have had a general idea of how some countries were doing, I didn’t really know which countries were on the right track and more importantly which countries were not.

Not until I visited the MDG Monitor this morning. The MDG Monitor is a website made available by UN, Google and Cisco, where you can now track the eight MDGs. The progress of more than 130 countries can be monitored on a colour-coded map, which displays each country’s progress towards each of the eight 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.

While I personally have my doubts about some countries’ committment to eradicate poverty, it was quite an education for me to see the data in particular for the countries that I thought I knew. Even though I knew where the main problems were, it was also quite an experience to have them confirmed in the global view.

You can see the map for yourself on the MDG Monitor, where you can also download the map as a Google Earth layer.

Note

All rights for the goal icons above belong to UNDP Brazil.

TAGS: Millennium Development Goals, the MDG Monitor, travel

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