MDGs: the eight goals that taught us to measure

Bajío Ventures · October 2026 · From commitment to project, 1 of 6

In September 2000, 189 States adopted the Millennium Declaration in New York. Eight goals came from it, with a date, 2015, and a baseline, 1990. It was the first time that development was treated as a project: targets, indicators and a deadline. This series starts there because almost everything now asked of an energy or industrial project — measure, report, compare — comes from that exercise.

In this series: 1. The MDGs (this post) · 2. The SDGs four years from 2030 · 3. What Mexico signed · 4. What the federal government is doing · 5. The Bajío states · 6. What Bajío Ventures can do

Eight goals, sixty indicators

There were eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development.

The original framework had 18 targets and 48 indicators. From January 2008 it had 21 targets and 60 indicators. The revision added decent work, reproductive health, HIV treatment and biodiversity.

What the world achieved

The final UN report (2015) gives the results:

Subject	1990	2015	Target
Extreme poverty in developing regions (USD 1.25 a day)	47%	14%	Met five years early
People in extreme poverty	1.9 billion	836 million	—
Undernourishment in developing regions	23.3%	12.9%	Almost met
Net primary enrolment in developing regions	83% (2000)	91%	Not met
Under-five mortality (per 1,000 live births)	90	43	Not met
Maternal mortality (per 100,000 live births)	380	210 (2013)	Not met
Access to improved drinking water	76%	91%	Met in 2010
Access to improved sanitation	54%	68%	Not met

Two figures complete the table. Global CO₂ emissions grew by more than 50% from 1990. And only five donor countries — Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom — exceeded 0.7% of their income in official development assistance.

What Mexico achieved

The 2015 progress report, prepared by the Office of the President with INEGI, the national statistics institute, tracked 51 indicators. The result: 37 met (72.5%), 6 due to be met in 2015, 4 with insufficient progress, 3 stagnant or deteriorating, and 1 without sufficient information.

Indicator	Baseline	Latest figure in the report	2015 target
Extreme poverty (USD 1.25 a day)	9.3% (1989)	3.7% (2014)	4.6% — met
Under-five mortality	41.0	15.7 (2013)	13.7
Maternal mortality ratio	88.7	38.2 (2013)	22.2 — “still far from the target”
Drinking water	78.4%	90.9% (2010)	89.2% — met
Sanitation	58.6%	87.7% (2010)	79.3% — met
Total CO₂ emissions	358.8 Mt	535.6 Mt (2012)	Reverse — not met
Forest area	35.3% (1993)	33.8% (2011)	Reverse — not met

The pattern matters more than the count. Mexico met the targets that depended on wider coverage: water, sewerage, schooling, vaccination. It did not meet the target that depended on service quality — maternal mortality — or the environmental targets: emissions, forests and the proportion of water resources used. That list is, almost unchanged, the pending agenda of 2026.

The Bajío in the MDGs

The same report breaks down 30 indicators by state.

State	Under-five mortality, 1990 → 2013	Maternal mortality, 1990 → 2013	Drinking water, 2010	Sanitation, 2010
Guanajuato	44.1 → 13.3	91.9 → 34.9	94.4%	88.7%
Querétaro	39.3 → 14.0	74.3 → 35.0	94.7%	89.9%
Aguascalientes	33.3 → 11.0	23.0 → 25.7	98.8%	97.5%
San Luis Potosí	41.6 → 16.1	93.5 → 31.8	85.5%	78.9%
Jalisco	34.1 → 12.9	54.8 → 22.4	95.8%	96.3%
National target	13.7	22.2	89.2%	79.3%

None of the five states reached the maternal mortality target. Jalisco missed it by two tenths of a point. San Luis Potosí stayed below the national targets for water and sanitation. The report says it plainly: “averages tend to hide uneven progress and disparities at the subnational level”.

What was missing from the design

Energy. No goal or target covered energy. In 2015, the UN Chronicle called it “the missing MDG”. In 2010, Brookings counted 1.5 billion people without access to modern energy, outside any indicator.

Inequality. The targets were measured with national averages. Jan Vandemoortele, one of the drafters, warned as early as 2002 that an average can improve while the poorest stay the same.

The commitments of rich countries. A technical group from the UN, the World Bank and the OECD drafted the final list. Fukuda-Parr and Hulme document that Goal 8 — the global partnership — was left without quantitative targets or deadlines.

The evidence. From 2005, the Millennium Villages Project took the full package to fourteen sites in ten countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Its final evaluation in The Lancet Global Health (2018) found favourable effects on 30 of 40 outcomes, mainly in agriculture and health. It found no significant effect on poverty measured by consumption, and one third of the targets met. The author of this post worked on that project and at the MDG Centre for West Africa. The lesson that remains is about method: without a baseline and without a comparison group, a project cannot prove what it achieved.

What Mexico took to the next agenda

Mexico did not reach 2015 only as an assessed country. The progress report records that Mexico organised five international workshops in 2014 and 2015 on social and economic inclusion. It also records that Mexico was “an active promoter of the multidimensional measurement of poverty, and achieved its incorporation into SDG 1”. In April 2013, Guadalajara hosted the regional consultation for Latin America and the Caribbean on the post-2015 agenda. One month earlier, Mérida hosted the consultation on energy, the subject that the MDGs had left out.

The MDG period also left institutions. The technical committee that coordinated MDG information was created in 2010. The information system that INEGI operates added municipal data in 2014 and state data in 2015. That same committee changed its name in November 2015 and now tracks the SDGs.

The takeaway

1. What has an indicator moves. The MDGs were eight sentences and sixty numbers. The numbers did the work. A project that presents itself as “sustainable” without an indicator, a baseline and a date is not in this tradition.

2. The national average does not describe the Bajío. San Luis Potosí and Aguascalientes appear at opposite ends of the same table. Any commitment to be enforced in the region must be measured in the region.

3. Energy came in late and came in whole. What was missing in 2000 has been, since 2015, a goal of its own: SDG 7. The next post covers that.

This note is for information only and is not legal or investment advice.

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Sources: UN — Millennium Summit, 2000 · ITU — original MDG framework · ESCWA — revised framework, 2008 · UN — The Millennium Development Goals Report 2015 · Office of the President of Mexico / INEGI — Los ODM en México: Informe de Avances 2015 · UN Chronicle — Sustainable Energy, Dec 2015 · Brookings — universal energy access, Sep 2010 · Vandemoortele — Are the MDGs feasible?, 2002 · Fukuda-Parr and Hulme — BWPI Working Paper 96, 2009 · Mitchell et al. — The Lancet Global Health, 2018 · CIVICUS — Guadalajara regional consultation, Apr 2013 · IISD — consultation on energy, Mérida, Mar 2013 · SNIEG — agreement creating the CTEODS

Bajío Ventures — a Mexican energy-infrastructure investment group based in Guanajuato: capital, a data platform on the region’s industrial base, and a German industrial channel, with its own advisory presence in Berlin.