CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

The problem of development has occupied the attention of scholars, activists, politicians, and developmental workers, local and international organizations for many years with an increased speed in the last decade. Though there are different perspectives to development, there is a general consensus that development could lead to good change manifested in increased capacity of people to have control over materials access, intellectual resources and ideology, and obtained physical necessities of life such as food, clothing, shelter, employment, equality, sustainable development, participate in government, adequate education among others. This is why some people have argued that the purpose of development is to improve people’s lives by expanding their choices, freedom and dignity. As the world was entering a new millennium, acknowledging the centrality of human development, the United Nations General Assembly in its millennium summit in 2002, adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). 

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are commitments made by world governments under the auspices of the United Nations Millennium Declaration in September 2000, to address the problem of poverty and promote sustainable development. Echezona and Okafor (2005) opine that, millennium development goals repress ent a global partnership that has grown from the commitments and targets established at the world summits of the 1990s.

 The millennium development goals (MDGs) are designed to bring about a positive change in the lives of billions of people in the world. Countries of both the developing and developed world may commit themselves to provide the resources and policies to attain these goals. The MDGs are drawn from the actions and targets contained in the millennium declaration that was adopted by 189 nations and signed by 147 heads of state and government. According to the argument of United Nations, attention has been drawn to the reality of the world that countries are underdeveloped with precarious development indices. More than 1.2 billion people or about 20 percent of world’s population survive on less than US $1 per day. The millennium summit held from 6th to 8th September, 2000 in New York, the largest gathering declaration committing nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound targets that has become known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). At the millennium summit, world leaders agreed on a set of goals to guide global development in the 21­­­­­­­­­­­­­­st century.   The MDGs has eight goals to be achieved by the year 2015 that responded to the world’s main development challenges. The Eight Goals according to United Nations (2000) as cited in Selim (2003) are to: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve Universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development. The summit went ahead to enumerate these eight goals considered of paramount important and termed them millennium goals.

 It is true that MDGs may reflect a global commitment to address the issue of human poverty in a time-bound manner. But even with all the good intentions of the world, realization of the commitments may not be easy and the path toward achieving the MDGs may not be smooth one. The MDGs are designed to bring about a positive change to the lives of billions of people in the world. They summarize the development aspiration of the world as a whole. They include universally accepted human values and right such as freedom from hunger, the right to basic education and health, a responsibility to future generation, developing a global partnership for development, poverty eradication and gender equality. Despite these laudable objective and importance of MDGs, people seem to remain in abject poverty in Africa with no proper awareness about health care service. It is not yet clear the extent to which the information agencies such as libraries, Mass media, archives, information and documentation centers and information brokerage firms have been involved in the dissemination of information to the public about the goals and strategies for realizing the MDGs. The failure to disseminate the needed information may hinder the realization of the MDGs in Kogi West Senatorial District which make people in that area to continue to suffer from poverty and illiteracy, child and maternal mortality may be on the increase and this may adversely affect the development in the state as well.

In today’s world there are several trends that may be acting as major structural constraints towards achieving the MDGs. No doubt, there are regional as well as country variations in terms of these constraints, yet a few key common ones easily identified include: Persistent human poverty: this means many developing countries, nearly one in every five people is undernourished, more than 850 million adult are illiterate, more than 1 billion people are without access to safe water and about 2 billion people are without electricity: High inequality: inequality takes many forms- in terms of access to basic social services or productive resources, income, human development outcomes and between socio-economic groups. There are certainly overlaps and mutual reinforcement of various dimensions: Economic stagnation, at constant inequality level, a country needs to grow by 3% or more to double income in a generation. Yet of 155 countries with data, only 30 had annual per capita income growth rates 3% in the 1990s. Among the rest, 54 countries saw annual average income fall, and in 71 countries annual income growth was less than 3%: Social exclusion: this denies the potentials of groups of people to make significant contribution to the development process, and it excludes people from participating in the decisions that affect their lives and it raises the fear of human insecurity among affected groups. All these denial and exclusion also make the achievement of MDGs quite difficult: Environmental degradation: this poses a serious threat to MDGs, not only in terms of Goal 7, but also on the other goals through its human impacts and it also negatively affect human well-being: HIV/AIDS: today, about 42million people are living with HIV/AIDS, not counting the 22 million who have already died of the disease. More than 70% of those affected today and it has also left 13 million orphans in its wake.