Business and the Millennium Development Goals

Summary

In 2000, the heads of 189 states agreed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). They set a fifteen-year target for the international community to make significant reductions in levels of extreme poverty, to increase poor people's access to basic goods and services, and to secure environmental sustainability.

One of the Goals identified the need for partnership with the private sector as an important element in social and economic development.

The MDGs were adopted in the context of increasing global insecurity, and poverty was perceived as a key factor fuelling it. The role of business, albeit important, was seen as no more than complementary to the obligation of the international community to meet the Goals. Consequently, the private sector was called upon primarily to 'make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications'.

Recent global crises - rising food prices, climate change, the credit crunch, social unrest - point to a markedly different relationship between businesses and the MDGs. Many companies are inextricably linked with these various problems, able either to exacerbate or to relieve them. Businesses are no longer merely complementary to the efforts of the international community to meet the MDGs. They are instrumental to their achievement.

With seven years until the target date, what matters most is that the initiatives that companies undertake are relevant to the global challenges we face, responsive to the needs of poor people, and critically, are incorporated into day-to-day business.

Oxfam's Briefings for Business

Date of publication: May 2008