 How can global collaboration help fight disease and illness? And what are the limitations of global projects? Those are kind of core questions you might want to be thinking about as we talk today about the Millennium Development Goals and global health. So in doing this, I think maybe I should first explain kind of what the history behind all of this is. First of all, we'll talk about the time before the Millennium Development Goals. Before these kind of came out, they came out in around the year 2000 although they kind of been in the works before that. Before that, organizations all sort of had their own goals and their own ideas. So you had small organizations and big organizations and tiny organizations and they were all sort of going off in one direction or another. So these guys were working in this direction, these were going this way, often they weren't very well connected and were often sort of chasing lots of different types of goals. And what the Millennium Development Goals tried to accomplish were to sort of bind these people together. So say these organizations can work together and build these guys together. We also want to get them all thinking about moving their goals all sort of in a common direction. Get everybody sort of on the same page so we're all going this way. And we'll do this by establishing goals. So this was done at a conference in 2000 and it was a big global conference called the Millennium Summit. And at that time, the world was really looking to establish a better pattern for development. And the Millennium Development Goals were eight things that sort of came out of the UN project that had kind of been bumping around for a while. And these eight goals became the core of the Millennium Project. Now these goals are also sort of divided up into targets and all sorts of other things with a lot more sort of complicated machinery inside of these goals. But the idea behind them was to create something that was sort of a kind of like a campaign statement towards certain goals. So instead of saying this is how we're going to do it specifically, they just established these sort of eight non-binding sort of ideas that they wanted to do. So non-binding is kind of important here. That means that by agreeing to work on these goals, nobody was sort of legally entering themselves or no country was legally entering themselves into some sort of obligation that they had to do it. It was basically an ethical approach to the whole thing. So it was an ethical call to say we have a problem, folks. There's a lot of poverty in the world and there are a lot of problems with development and we need to think about these things and we need to kind of put ourselves, put our heads together and think about what we can do about this. The big thing that are sort of like looking back on it now that is really different about these goals than things before it is that they really kind of emphasize capacity building and on the human level. So we're thinking now about health, for example. Health is a really important one and we're thinking too about education and we're also thinking about incomes. So they kind of wanted to find ways to create sort of an environment in which people in the developing world can build their own future and build their own sort of luck in a way and make a better go at it in a world that at the time and still is changing every day. What were these goals? Well, there were set eight of them and three of them directly had to do with healthcare and one of them sort of indirectly has to do with it or actually all of them really have to do with it indirectly. So those three that are sort of directly related start with number four which is about childhood mortality. Let's see here, child mortality. You also had maternal health, so here we'll put maternal health and you had diseases, so HIV, AIDS, malaria, and other. And so these are the three goals that are directly related up with them sort of with this pink line here. They're directly related to health. Child mortality was goal number four. The maternal health was goal number five and HIV and AIDS, malaria, all these sort of things were goal number six. Goal number one was about hunger and income. So I'm going to put that actually as one of our sort of health sort of related ones because hunger is a very major issue in the developing world. So these eight goals, between one and four there was also universal education and gender equality between seven and going on from six there was seven was about sustainable environment which obviously relates back to health and then global partnerships which also relate back to health because a lot of the global partnerships that have arisen in that time since then have been around healthcare. So that's a pretty good development in a way. Now these three sort of health related goals though were chosen for a good reason and why they would have done this is if you take a look for example let's start with child mortality. So every year about 7.6 million children per year are dying under the age of five. So I'm going to put U5 for under five. And that is a very high number especially because two-thirds are preventable and preventable for with very little money and resources. It's pretty staggering if you think about it. And if you go back to the mid-90s or early 90s the number was around 10 or 12 million which there has been a reduction. So if you take a look at what's happened over time with this number you kind of got your graph and over time that number is sort of falling and maybe someday we want to be down around here. So we've still got quite a ways to go but this movement down towards lower numbers has been in big part because of the global partnerships that have happened or so global we'll call it the global effort. It's been a very big part in dropping this number. Maternal health is also a really big one. If you are a woman in a country that has a developed health care system or has a well-developed health care system your chance of dying in childbirth is somewhere around 20 in 10,000. If you live in a country with an undeveloped health care system or a poor health care system your chances of dying are 830 in 10,000. Take a look at that and just imagine how many more letters of magnitude that is. That's a lot. The goal with the specific goal, one of the targets of this was to cut mortality by 3 fourths from the number in 1990 and to provide some sort of universal reproductive health care which doesn't look like that's going to happen in a lot of places but there has been great steps towards this sort of goal. Actually, thinking about this number down here with the death rate if you take a look at the death rate for child mortality over here you're actually 70 times more likely to die as under the age of 5 in a country like Chad than you are in, for example, Sweden. So these numbers here, this number of sort of this rate that you're seeing of death compared to the developed world is not just for mothers, it's also for children and it's also for people over here in number 6 although these diseases haven't hit developed countries in the way that they've hit undeveloped countries or underdeveloped countries in the same way. Alright, so let's go take a look then at HIV AIDS and malaria. Well, these right here, especially at that time, were climbing out of control. HIV AIDS was really at that time growing and growing. At this moment it's sort of leveled out and it's starting to sort of fall off. Malaria, however, is still remaining pretty consistent although it has taken a little bit of a hit because of efforts from the outside. But all of these sort of indicators, so hunger, child mortality, maternal health and HIV AIDS and malaria were all chosen because they in part are really holding back in their own way, holding back the economies and the development possibilities of all of these countries. So if you take a look at the numbers, if you kind of look at these things as a group they're responsible for a large, large, large part of why countries are having such a hard time moving forward and becoming sort of economically independent and more viable. And that obviously trickles down into the lives of the individual people in those societies. So by getting rid of these sort of barriers and sort of the things that are holding people back from really succeeding in life well then maybe development is more possible. So these goals are very important to the overall idea of development around the world. So now the question is, have the Millennium Development Goals really accomplished what they had tried to achieve? Let's just take, for example, we've got three big countries here, sort of contributors. Let me go out all these small countries. One of the main critiques about the Millennium Development Goals is that they've sort of propagated or sort of put forward something that was already happening already before they were established which is that many countries had sort of pet projects. They had one or two countries that they were sort of feeding already. The Millennium Development Goals has just sort of made these countries stronger so they've all kind of had some sort of benefit from them. The whole set of countries that really have remained outside of the development project or the sort of development sort of scheme and so these countries, these ones that I've marked and read here haven't really received as much aid as their neighbors in some cases or as the non-allies of these countries they haven't been as sort of favored in the whole process and they have therefore not developed as quickly as the others. There's a whole class of countries that have really seen huge growth. You've seen many countries that have just kind of had like just flat economic growth and there are even some countries that are still sort of on their way down and if you look in a deeper sense, the deeper movements in the economy, many countries are actually a part of that sort of downward movement. But that's one sort of aspect. One of the maybe the more positive ones is that the Millennium Development Goals did a great job of sort of grouping organizations that were already interested in development and sort of putting them off in one direction or another. The great thing about having eight very flexible goals is that you can have organizations like for example the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation with lots of international money and they say, okay, these are the things that we're funding and sort of by subject has gone through and funded projects that have sort of been grouped by these foundations and organizations and sort of sent them all off in the direction of the Millennium Development Goals and that's been really great for development as sort of as a whole. They've seen things like, especially with let's say for example, malaria has gotten a lot, a big boost in sort of its visibility around the world and it's gotten a lot more money than it would have without them. You also had HIV and also initiatives like education have all been sort of profited from the Millennium Development Goals in a pretty big way. Now the question is what's the future look like and the future of the Millennium Development Goals it ends in 2015. So if you're watching this after 2015 then you already know what's happened to the Millennium Development Goals. I sitting here in 2012 don't know what's going to happen to them. There is talk at this moment about there being some sort of sustainable development goals being established and so they would basically take the Millennium Development Goals fold them into the first sort of perspective and then add a few more. So similar to these eight goals you'd have another new set of goals and goal number one might be to accomplish the Millennium Development Goals finally. So we'll see if that happens. At this moment the Millennium Development Goals from my seat here in 2012 are not going to be accomplished in many countries by 2015 but a lot of progress has been made and so the question is has this been good? Well it's been good and bad. It's accomplished a lot of great things and there have also been a lot of disappointments. So global collaboration, well I guess that is sort of a matter of viewpoint whether you think it's been good or bad but in general I would say that it's definitely brought more attention to these issues. It's definitely also established a set of goals that are common around the world that everyone understands as being important and that is definitely important to something like development that really is a global project. Alright so that was our lesson about the Millennium Development Goals and health. You can check out more lessons about development and health and lots of other things at alversity.org.