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At the Millennium Summit in September
2000, countries reaffirmed their commitment to working toward a world in
which sustaining development and eliminating poverty would have the highest
priority. To ensure that progress towards this end be measurable, a set of
goals, targets, and indicators for combating poverty, hunger, disease,
illiteracy, environmental degradation amongst others have been identified.
These measures, collectively known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),
have become a prime focus of development work through-out the globe -- a gold
standard to which programs aspire, and by which they measure their work. MDG
indicators related to health are a mix of health outcome (prevalence &
death rate) and service output measures (coverage & use of specific
health interventions). There exist 18 health & health related indicators,
‘health’ & ‘health related’ refer to indicators that are truly ‘health’
such as malaria prevalence or that concern critical factors for health, e.g.
access to improved water supply or dietary energy consumption & so on.
One of the first steps to take forward the MDGs
is to assess where the country stands in relation to MDGs
and also review various issues and challenges that will be critical in
achieving the goals.
Three principles guide WHO’s work on
the MDGs:
 To assist Member Countries to develop and
work towards a more complete set of health goals that are relevant to their
particular circumstances.
To assist Member Countries to develop
goals and plans to ensure that the poor share fully in progress towards the
health- related MDGs.
To advocate, at global and regional levels
that developed countries work towards their part of the compact, especially
by acting on those elements of Goal 8 that are of central importance to the MDGs.
The WHO India Office has supported two
studies which seek to review the progress made towards the achievement of the
MDGs. These two documents seek to understand the
indicators related to the health related MDGs,
especially maternal and child health; diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis
and malaria; nutrition; water supply and sanitation and accessibility to
essential drugs. Secondly, the study aims to make an assessment of their
present status against the set targets (in the form of pre defined
indicators), Thirdly, it examines the current policies and programs that are
directed towards attending each of these goals and finally it looks at the
challenges that are faced to achieve them and the possible ways to overcome
those challenges.
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