Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions. They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.

However, approximately 426 million people with disabilities in developing countries live below the poverty line.

General assembly resolution A/RES/64/131 on “realizing the MDGs for persons with disabilities” recalls that persons with disabilities are facing multiple discrimination, particularly women with disabilities, and remain largely invisible to the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the MDGs.

Lack of access and inclusion for persons with disabilities in policies and programmes aimed at achieving the MDGs means that the achievement of the MDGs is impossible.

The resolution calls on Member States and the UN system to take concrete steps to overcome this invisibility and to make MDGs inclusive of persons with disabilities by implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

2010 Summit on the Millennium Development Goals

To ensure the end to the invisibility and exclusion of persons with disabilities in the MDG proccess, IDA worked to include references to persons with disabilities in the outcome document of the MDG summit, which took place in New York, September 20 and 22, 2010.

Please click the links below to have access to documents prepared by IDA for this Summit:

  • IDA initial comments to zero draft of MDG outcome document: English
  • IDA position paper on the MDGs: English
  • IDA statement to “Informal Interactive Hearings of the General Assembly with Non-governmental organizations, civil society organizations and the private sector, New York, 14-15 June 2010”: English

The outcome document for the MDG Summit was adopted by the General Assembly by consensus on 22 September. It includes an action agenda for achieving the eight MDGs by their 2015 target date and the announcement of major new commitments for women's and children's health, and other initiatives against poverty, hunger and disease. From a disability point of view, the outcome is partly satisfactory with three explicit references and a paragraph on inclusion and accessibility for education.

MDG Outcome document 2010 and brief analysis made by IDA on the Outcome Document.