Senior fellow Charles Kenny comments on a recent study on the UN MDG's progress.
A new study suggests that the United Nations' much-lauded Millennium Development Goals, which expire in the year 2015, did not accelerate developmental progress globally after they were announced in September 2000.
"The general result was that there was no trend in statistically significant accelerations in the MDG indicators after 2000," writes author Howard Friedman in the study.
In part, this may be because the global community was already focused on problems like poverty and universal education before the goals were set forward, something Friedman acknowledges in the study and says may explain why few colleagues expressed surprise when they saw the findings.
"We've been making progress in a lot of these areas for some time," says Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development who previously authored a paper on what the goals had achieved. "But what the study suggests and evidence suggests is that we need to be careful at assuming how much we can speed progress in these areas going forward."
Kenny says the lesson learned is the U.N.'s goals should be ambitious but not unrealistic.