Make Social Change A Reality

On September 25th, the United Nations met in New York City to evaluate progress on the eight Millennium Development Goals . More than two months later, it’s still hard to dig through news about GM’s failures, Obama’s picks, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks to really assess the situation. The press briefing from the Summit offers critique, but also hope for the future. Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown have gathered a team and formulated a plan to achieve the three MDGs for Health : reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; and combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases. The team also includes World Bank President Robert Zoellick, Director-General of the World Health Organization Margaret Chan, and Bill Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Thus far progress has been slow and not steady. At the current rate of reduction, the UN’s efforts will see child mortality drop by only one-third instead of two. D...

Rounding out the last of the Millennium Development Goals are goals seven and eight, Environmental Stability and Global Partnership . Both of these goals are so much more specific than the previous six, Goal 7 including four targets and Goal 8 including five, that it would be impossible to examine them exhaustively in such a short space. Therefore, let’s examine one target per goal. For a more detailed look at these aims, please visit the website for the United Nations, www.un.org. To ensure environment sustainability, target three aims to, “halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. “ One Step Forward: Thirst Relief International is an international nonprofit organization that works with local groups to implement safe, potable water facilities in communities all over the globe. With projects in the Congo, Amazon, Kenya, and many more countries, Thirst Relief provides funding and serves as project mana...

Millennium Development Goals five and six are closely related to goals three and four discussed last week. As we move on, it will become more apparent what an emphasis the United Nations has put on healthcare in the fight to eliminate poverty. The fifth Millennium Development Goal is to “improve maternal health.” Maternal health encompasses not only prenatal and postnatal care, but also family planning and education in proper childcare. Therefore, this is actually a very broad statement and not much else. Included in this goal are pledges to reduce the maternal morality ratio by two-thirds, as well as achieve universal access to reproductive health. This first target does help to clarify the goal. However, the word “universal” in target two is so expansive that its inclusion can actually undermine the UN’s ability to achieve its goals. One Step Forward: Each year the world loses over 10 million mothers and children, and the fact remains that many of these deaths are...

The first of the eight Millennium Development Goals is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. Encompassed in this goal are targets to halve between 1990 and 2015 the number of people living on less than one dollar a day, ensure employment and “decent work” for all, and halve the number of people suffering from hunger. This first objective in particular is quite broad and stands precariously on vague language. There is no concrete definition for concepts like “extreme poverty” or “decent work”. Terminology of this sort threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the UN’s aims. The language conveys overwhelming international social problems that seem impossible to solve over the course of a decade by member states simply tweaking their respective foreign policies. One Step Forward: The Citizens Network for Foreign Affairs is a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization that runs Farmer-to-Farmer projects in Moldova, Belarus, and the Ukraine as part of USAID’s John ...

The article I read in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Desperate Burmese Labor in Thailand ” made me think a little more about consumer responsibility and the role of civil society in assisting citizens of countries under political turmoil. It is about Burmese workers who cross the Burma-Thailand border to get a job at a factory that will pay them enough to feed their families back home. The conflict situation in Burma primarily because of the junta, and the challenging economic state the Burmese find themselves has caused hordes of people in need, mainly women, to immigrate to neighboring Thailand for work under unwanted circumstances. There are cases where child labor has been documented in factories that work for big multinational corporations. To top of the already strained financial situation of the country, the US has announced new, harder sanctions against the Burmese state. If such sanctions are ordered the Burmese are the first who will be affected by the measures (and not th...