Population Council Research that makes a difference

Reduce poverty; improve the lives of the world's people

In September 2000, United Nations members declared their collective responsibility to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality, and equity at the global level. They outlined eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce poverty and improve the lives of the world's people, and 191 member states have pledged to meet these goals by 2015.

The Population Council designs health products, service-delivery programs, and public policies responsive to the needs of people living in the world’s poorest countries. The organization's global network of scientists and specialists conducts research on a wide range of themes. Much of the Council’s work is aligned with and contributes to the achievement of the MDGls.

To learn more about a few of the Population Council’s projects that support efforts to achieve the MDGs, click the goals below.

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
   • Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day
   • Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger
     
2. Achieve universal primary education
   • Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling
     
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
   • Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015
     
4. Reduce child mortality
   • Reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under five
     
5. Improve maternal health
   • Reduce by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio
     
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
   • Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS
   • Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases
     
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
   • Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources
   • Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water
   • Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020
     
8. Develop a global partnership for development
   • Develop further an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory. Includes a commitment to good governance, development, and poverty reduction—nationally and internationally
   • Address the least developed countries’ special needs. This includes tariff- and quota-free access for their exports; enhanced debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries; cancellation of official bilateral debt; and more generous official development assistance for countries committed to poverty reduction
   • Address the special needs of landlocked and small island developing States
   • Deal comprehensively with developing countries’ debt problems through national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term
   • In cooperation with the developing countries, develop decent and productive work for youth
   • In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries
   • In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies—especially information and communications technologies