By Amanda Stone
In this video produced by The New School Milano program for Management and Urban Policy in partnership with the United Nations, graduate students take to the streets of New York City as part of a social media campaign to educate the public about the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
In 2009 the total number of malnourished people rose above 1 billion. (photo credit: Bernard Pollack)
In September of 2000 after a decade of major United Nations conferences and summits, world leaders came together to adopt the eight MDGs, which range from halving extreme poverty to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing primary education universally by 2015 to meet the needs of the world’s poverty. But UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon admits that the implementation of these goals has “been unacceptably slow.” In fact, in 2005-2007, the number of undernourished people had actually increased from the initial benchmark, with the total exceeding one billion in 2009 after the 2008 spike in food prices due to the financial crisis, according to the 2010 MDG report.
To galvanize support for reaching the goals, the United Nations created the MDG Awards Committee, a nonprofit organization with a mission to disseminate information to the public and to recognize and spotlight the successes of stakeholders who are making progress towards MDG implementation by the 2015 target date.
Want to see more? Check out the MDG Awards Youtube channel and these entries to the UN Citizen Ambassador video contest where participants around the world tell UN leaders why the MDGs are important and how the international community can achieve them.
Amanda Stone is Nourishing the Planet’s Communications Assistant.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
