Achieving the Millennium Development Goals and going beyond them – comment and the Situation in Africa

The goals were set for 2015 in the United Nations Millennium Declaration (2000) and took as a baseline the data for 1990.
http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/goals/gti.htm#goal1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Development_Goals#Goal_1:_Eradicate_extreme_poverty_and_hunger
http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/0,,menuPK:476823~pagePK:64165236~piPK:64165141~theSitePK:469372,00.html
http://www.bizjournals.com/prnewswire/press_releases/2012/03/06/DC64970
http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/expert_paper/How_to_Feed_the_World_in_2050.pdf
http://www.eoi.es/blogs/lauraambros/2012/01/17/millenium-development-goals-for-sub-saharan-africa/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17270014
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2012/drinking_water_20120306/en/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/dec/02/africa-significant-progress-mdgs
“The report said huge regional disparities existed. Almost half of the 2 billion people who have gained access to drinking water since 1990 live in China or India. Meanwhile, many countries in Africa are not on track to meet the target by 2015, with some countries actually falling back to pre-1990 rates of coverage. More than 40% of all people globally who lack access to drinking water live in sub-Saharan Africa.”
Quote from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/mar/06/water-millennium-development-goals
also:
“Millennium Development Goals progress reports overestimate access to safe water
New research suggests that official reports overestimate progress towards the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target for access to safe drinking water. The researchers show that the current methods oversimplify the measure by not accounting for water quality; the key measure of safety. In four of the five developing countries studied, the reduction in reported progress would be substantial. It is likely that MDG safe-water progress in other developing countries is similarly overstated …”
For full article see:
http://bristol.ac.uk/news/2012/8287.html
Some experts argue that global progress in trying to achieve the poverty reduction MDG is the result of economic growth, particularly in China (lifting huge numbers out of poverty), rather than the result of international cooperation and aid programs. Progress globally is difficult to measure and very uneven.
Some experts argue that Africa is unlikely to meet its 2015 MDGs due to the global recession and population growth. Progress is obviously relative to the scale of the challenge and many people are unaware of the extent of the problem in Africa:
sub-Saharan Africa, where 47 percent of the population lived in extreme poverty in 2008 compared with 51% in 1981.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/02/29/worlds-extreme-poverty-cut-in-half-since-1990/
This improvement seems to have partly disappeared as a result of the recession with the 2010 rate at 50.9% according to:
  http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm
 (figures from World Bank, text from World Hunger EducationService).
In this situation any progress is good news but eradicating extreme poverty would seem to be a very long term goal for Africa.
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/extreme-poverty-drops-worldwide/
http://africajournalismtheworld.com/2012/03/01/africa-fails-to-meet-world-bank-poverty-goal/
http://www.endpoverty2015.org/en/node/587
http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/africa-and-the-millennium-development-goals
http://www.mdg-review.org/index.php/news/1-latest-news/254-mdg-summit-cape-town-2012
Good Foreign Affairs article:
http://www.fungglobalinstitute.org/en/own-goals