Students support the Millennium Development Goals.

• Author: Neville, Faye

THE WORLD'S YOUTH are working to support the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)--thanks to the United Nations, the 2005 Live8 concert, MTV and some international celebrities, such as Irish musician Bono, actor Richard Gere of the United States, singer Angelique Kido from Benin, tennis player and actor Vijay Amritrai from India, and the Los Tigres del Norte band from Mexico, as well as other websites.

In 2000, Governments committed themselves to a global partnership, pledging to achieve the eight MDGs by 2015: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education for all boys and girls; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce by two thirds the mortality rate of children under five; reduce by three quarters the ratio of maternal mortality; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustain-ability; and develop a global partnership for development. While these goals are real challenges, the international community has the money, technology and resources to achieve them--we just need the will.

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The World Bank estimates that about 1.1 billion people, one fifth of the global population, live in extreme poverty. Some 44 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa are subsisting on less than a dollar a day, 29.9 per cent in southern Asia and 16.6 per cent in eastern Asia. Each year, 18 million people die from poverty-related causes, which is about 270 million since 1990, roughly the population of the United States.

Health care is another crisis. In 2005, sub-Saharan Africa had 25.8 million people suffering from HIV--two thirds of the total worldwide--2.4 million died of AIDS and 3.2 million were newly infected. While antiviral drugs are saving thousands of lives in the Western world, Africans have less access to these life-saving medicines.

On education, over 100 million children are not in school, 46 per cent of girls in poor countries have no access to primary education and more than one in four adults--two thirds are women--cannot read nor write. Universal primary education would cost $10 billion a year, which is half of what Americans spend on ice cream. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reports that there are 137 million youths, aged 15 to 24, worldwide who are illiterate, 61 per cent of them women.

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