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The Millennium Development Goals represent arguably the largest and most cohesive global collaboration to promote health, particularly child health, ever launched.
As Patron of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, I am delighted to support this project, which was inaugurated by the United Nations at the 2000 Millennium Development summit and endorsed by all member states. The declaration was philosophically based upon reaching ambitious yet potentially achievable targets by 2015 in eight key areas: poverty; education; gender equality; child mortality; maternal health; HIV and malaria; environmental sustainability; and the promotion of global development.
Each of these areas has clear direct or indirect relevance to child health and, as the deadline for the first phase of the Millennium Development Goals is reached, this special ADC supplement examines the successes and failures in each of the goals to date, assesses the progress made by world region and looks beyond 2015 towards the next phase of the project