Overall MDG Progress Score
Poverty

Hunger

Education

Gender

Child Mortality

Maternal Mortality

HIV/AIDS

Water
Progress Scores 
Countries colored white have no data for this view


Year
2011
2010
Change from 2010 to 2011
Countries
All
Low-income
Middle-income
Click a country on the map or the right side list for its 2011 scorecard
Sources: World Development Indicators 2011, The Lancet: Maternal Mortality for 181 Countries

The World
South America
Central America
Caribbean
All of Africa
Northern Africa
Central Africa
Eastern Africa
Western Africa
Southern Africa
South Asia
Asia - Pacific
Asia - Central
Asia - Northern
Middle East
Eastern Europe
Ranking

Last year, international attention focused heavily on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In the context of multiple high-level events such as the UN MDG Summit in September 2010, government leaders, development experts, and other stakeholders examined trends in global and regional progress. At the same time, the financial crisis in the developed world continued to work its way through much of the developing world. Despite these challenges, the international community committed to redouble efforts toward achieving the highly ambitious MDG targets by the 2015 deadline. Utilizing CGD's MDG Progress Index and newly available data for 2009 and 2010, we outline updated trends of how individual countries are faring against eight core MDG targets (extreme poverty, hunger, education, gender, child mortality, maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS, and water). Key findings include the following:

  1. Low- Versus Middle-Income Country Performance: Overall, low-income countries' progress toward the highly ambitious MDGs improved modestly while middle-income countries' performance declined slightly because of a deterioration in the Middle East and North Africa.
  2. Indicator Performance Trends: Low-income countries improved, on average, on four core MDG target indicators: extreme poverty, hunger, HIV/AIDs, and water. Performance declined modestly for three core MDG indicators: education, gender equality, and child mortality.
  3. Country Changes: Among low-income countries, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Niger produced the most dramatic improvements. For middle-income countries, Mexico and Uruguay exhibited the most dramatic improvements.
  4. Absolute Country Performance: Honduras and Ecuador remain tied for the best performing countries. In addition, low-income countries account for over half of MDG trailblazer countries.
  5. Data Challenges: Widespread data revisions or retractions affected a number of countries' MDG Progress Index scores, particularly in relation to the education indicator. This effect highlights the practical limitations of attempting to track annual MDG progress and the sensitivity of performance trends to often poor, non-static data sources.

This interactive MDG web tool provides a graphic illustration of each country's progress toward the highly ambitious MDG targets. Users can examine performance trends for either this year or last year across each core MDG indicator. Moreover, the tool now includes a comparison of year-over-year changes in performance trends. We continue to provide supplementary map overlays for those MDGs with absolute performance targets (education and gender), which are widely considered to be biased and unfair to countries starting from a low baseline. These alternative measures illustrate each country's average annual progress, which is arguably a much more realistic measure of real-world improvements. Updated MDG Progress Scorecards for each country will be available very soon. Finally, we have included the complete underlying dataset to provide our users with even greater workability. Overall, we hope that this year's analysis and enhanced web tool garner as much interest and usage as last year's.

The authors are committed to creating the most user-friendly web-app as possible. They welcome questions, comments and suggestions on the methodology, findings, and data display. Email Jonathan Karver.