Suggest reasons for the variable progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goal targets. (10)

The United National is an organization composed of many countries all over the world, and was founded in 1945. The introduction of the Millennium Development Goals is one of the major steps the UN has made to achieve some of their aims. The goals include 8 separate targets agreed in the 1990’s set to be reached by 2015. There are however, reasons that have made this target hard to come by. With the exception of the Sub Saharan Africa; all regions are on track to achieve MDG1 (Eradicate extreme hunger and poverty). The main issue is facing the achievement of this particular MDG is the economic strength of certain countries, in addition the climate and geographical features of each country need to be taken into consideration. It is clear some countries will meet the standard needed by 2015 whilst othe§ rs will be left behind. The 2009 global depression costed sub-Saharan Africa’s people £12.8 billion, which as a result makes its MDG hard to achieve. The world bank is said to increase its support to agriculture to between $6 billion, and $8 billion a year over the next three years, up from $4.1 billion annually before 2008. Millennium Development Goals also consist of that related to health e.g health issues, maternal health, HIV/Aid, child maternity etc. These three MDG’s have already been achieved by Thailand; however other countries appear to be struggling. In Uganda 50% of the reported illnesses in 2006 were Malaria, down from 56% in 1999, but still way of the target set. One of the reasons for the continuous high counts of diseases is due to the lack on insecticide treated nets, it is a simple way of tackling the problem. This could suggest that this problem could be fought in a simple way and would not require extensive amounts of economic strength or aid from elsewhere, and as a result could perhaps help towards MDG 6 being achieved in particular countries. As a result of the aid given from other countries and education improvements, global mortality under 1 year olds and under 5 year olds has been reduced by 2.8% and 2.3%. If this continued then the under 5 year old rate will decrease by 2/3’s by the year 2015, however the maternal mortality rate is still high and remains a challenge to surpass. The World bank suggests that the 20 poorest countries may need another $20 billion to cope with the high maternal mortality rates that they still face. As as example, in Uganda only 41!% of births are attended to by a skilled professional, this is why maternal mortality is such a frustrating issues because it is easily preventible, many causes of it are sever bleeding, unsafe abortions, and the risk of Malaria, and Aids.