MDGs

The issue

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight fantastically important targets that a whole load of countries belonging to the United Nations signed up to in 2000, with a deadline of 2015 to meet them all by.

They aim to cut world poverty by half in that time, and are the UN's response (some say a late and embarrassed response) to downright depressing facts about the world’s poor.

But progress so far has been disappointingly slow and rich countries need to buck their ideas up if the deadline of 2015 is going to be met.