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Millennium Development Goals

At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, member states of the United Nations, including Australia, reaffirmed their commitment to eliminate global poverty and hunger, to improve health, gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability and to create a global partnership for development. This commitment produced the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Since then major international forums like the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development (2002) and the World Summit for Sustainable Development (2002) have recognised that the resources required to meet the Goals will need to be generated from all sources. Aid alone is not sufficient to ensure the goals are met.

In order to meet the MDGs, financing will need to be generated from greater trade and investment flows as well as domestic resource mobilisation. This highlights the critical relationship between good governance, growth and improved human development outcomes.

These forums also reinforced that individual countries must lead their own development efforts and that their circumstances and priorities must be recognised in all partnerships for sustainable development.

Australian aid and the MDGs

Australia is helping developing countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Through working with partner governments to develop effective poverty reduction strategies relevant to their circumstances and priorities, Australia is helping build the growth and stability essential to achieving the goals.

For example, our strengthened efforts in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands are helping build stability and law and order as well as improve budgetary systems so as to create the investment and growth settings required for sustainable poverty reduction.

The key to progress is sustainable broad-based economic growth. Experience from East Asia, where over 500 million people have been lifted out of absolute poverty from 1981-2001, demonstrates that growth is essential to reduce poverty and is needed to generate the vast majority of resources required to reach the MDGs.

Australia's approach to the MDGs underlines the need for an open, non-discriminatory trading and financial system supported by continuing improvements in governance and stability, sound investments in people, commitment to private sector growth and openness to trade and investment.

More broadly, Australia's aid program focuses on:

  • improving the policy environment for private sector growth
  • promoting trade through assistance for trade analysis, trade policy and trade facilitation, such as more efficient customs and quarantine services
  • supporting the drivers of growth by:
    • investing in infrastructure
    • building skilled workforces in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, focusing on technical and vocational programs in areas that meet domestic and international employment needs
    • strengthening support for private sector-led rural and business development.
  • addressing environmental challenges to growth through focusing on climate change and adaptation, water, and strengthening environmental regulatory regimes.

See also:

2006

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