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Change the World in Eight Steps
‘Poverty is not natural. It is man-made and can be overcome and eradicated.’
Nelson Mandela
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How can we overcome poverty? This was a question the world’s leaders asked themselves at the turn of the millennium. Their response was to devise a set of goals to reduce poverty by 2015 – the Millennium Development Goals.
View the winners of our Millennium Development Goals competition!
Change the World in Eight Steps is a set of posters helping teachers of 7 to 14 year olds to introduce these goals to their pupils and to help them understand the issues behind them. How does education help societies become more prosperous? How many people don't have clean drinking water? How many women around the world die in pregnancy and childbirth? Above all, what can we do to change this situation?
Change the World in Eight Steps helps teachers tackle subjects which are not always easy to discuss in the classroom. It provides teachers with statistics, facts, visual materials and activities to engage pupils and enable them to think critically about world poverty and how it can be overcome.
The world’s leaders have already made these promises. It’s up to us to make sure that they keep them.
You can download all the activities free of charge. (This facility is meant to help teachers who have stuck the posters on the wall.) You can also view the poster fronts. Printed copies of the posters can be ordered here.
The Millennium Development Goals
What are the Millennium Development Goals?
The
eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are international targets for reducing global poverty. They aim to lift around 500 million people out of poverty by the year 2015. If this happens, fewer women will die in childbirth, fewer people will die from treatable diseases, many more boys and girls will go to school and the lives of millions of people will improve dramatically.
How did they come about?
In
the year 2000, the member states of the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Millennium Declaration. This document contains the MDGs, a set of realistic and achievable targets. By signing up to these goals, governments of the world have committed themselves to working collaboratively towards a better future for us all.
What is happening now?
Progress on the goals will be measured each year, in order to help achieve them all by 2015. For the first seven goals, the onus is on the governments of developing countries to ensure that targets are met or bettered. It is the eighth goal, however, to ‘build a global partnership for development’ that will create the conditions necessary for achieving the other seven. With this goal, the responsibility falls on the richer countries and the wider ‘global community’ to reduce debt, to give more and better aid and to make trade fairer, among other measures.
However, at the current rate of progress, many of the targets will be missed and it is therefore vital that pressure is stepped up on the world community to increase efforts to achieve them.
Read more about each goal and download photos and activities
> Order a printed copy of the full poster set (priced £15)
> Free Summary poster - To order a free Summary poster explaining the Millennium Development Goals and containing activities for the classroom, email education@oxfam.org.uk or phone 0870 333 2700.
> Read the Millennium Development Goals Report 2005 - The UN's 2005 report on progress towards achieving the goals.
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