Welcome

At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, the largest gathering of world leaders in history adopted the UN Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound targets, with a deadline of 2015, which have become known as the Millennium Development Goals.

The eight MDGs are global targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions—income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter and exclusion—while promoting gender equality, education and environmental sustainability. They are also basic human rights, the rights of each person on the planet to food, health, education, shelter and security. Those global targets must be translated into local action.

By early 2004, concerns had been raised that most of Africa had gotten off track with respect to achieving the MDGs, so the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York and the UN Millennium Project (UNMP) established the MDG Technical Support Centre in Nairobi in July of that year.

The Centre, renamed The MDG Centre in 2006, initially focused on policy support at the national level to selected pilot countries of the UNMP (Kenya, Ethiopia, Senegal and Ghana). With the successful completion of the UNMP in late 2006, the Centre broadened its scope of work to include advisory services and support to the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) and to scale up MDG-related interventions to district and national levels in East and Southern Africa.

The MDG Centre operates in seven countries in East and Southern Africa--Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda—and has plans to engage with at least three more countries in the region. The Centre also provides technical backstopping to the only Millennium Village in Asia, in the Samlaut district of Cambodia.

A second MDG Centre with a mandate for West and Central Africa was established in Bamako, Mali, in 2006.