Millennium Development Goals

World poverty seen falling sharply but patchily, By Teresa Cerojano (AP), September 15, 2010, Washington Post: “It’s lunchtime, but the cooking pots are empty outside Nurain Dimalao’s shack. Her 7-year-old son plays amid the flies in garbage-strewn sand. She worries where his next meal will come from. Baseco Compound, a shantytown of 50,000 people on the edge of Manila Bay, is the familiar face of poverty in villages and urban slums around the world. Yet there’s also good news, albeit qualified: Worldwide, the poor are getting less poor, though not everywhere. The share of the population of developing regions who live in extreme poverty is expected to fall to 15 percent by 2015, down from 46 percent in 1990, according to the U.N. The gains stem largely from robust economic growth in countries such as China and India, the world’s two most populous countries. Ten years ago, the U.N. set eight ‘Millennium Development Goals’ to tackle the world’s most pressing humanitarian problems by halving rates of affliction in such areas as disease, poverty and lack of basic education by 2015, compared with 1990…”