NEW YORK TIMES: Dire poverty has dropped sharply, and just as many girls as boys are now enrolled in primary schools around the world. Simple measures like installing bed nets have prevented some six million deaths from malaria. But nearly one billion people still defecate in the open, endangering the health of many others.
These are among the findings that the United Nations released Monday as part of a final report on the successes and failures of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets established 15 years ago to improve the lives of the poor…
In releasing the report, United Nations officials celebrated meeting some of the goals. For instance, one of the targets was to halve the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty by 2015, but the actual decline was steeper: 14 percent of people in the developing world are extremely poor now, compared with 47 percent in 1990. China did the most, reducing the share of its people in extreme poverty to just 4 percent this year, from 61 percent in 1990.
