Question

Another summit, another alphabet soup of targets from the United Nations.

This weekend the UN will draw a line under the millennium development goals (MDGs), the targets agreed on 15 years ago to “spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanising conditions of extreme poverty”.

But there will be no rest for the international organisation.Almost exactly 15 years after the MDGs were announced, world leaders will once again agree a “plan of action for people, planet and prosperity”, and annouce the successors to the MDGs, the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs).

Though the finer details of the SDGs have yet to hammered out, the mere fact of their advent raises an inevitable question: will they succeed where their predecessors failed?

The UN’s final report on the MDGs, released in July, painted a decidedly mixed picture.The MDGs helped lift more than a billion people out of extreme poverty, but the goal of achieving universal primary education was just missed, as was the target of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger.

The question of what can be achieved by the SDGs is particularly pressing given their ambitious scope: among other things the SDGs propose to eradicate extreme poverty and gender-based discrimination by 2030.

The SDGs – which have already been attacked for being too numerous and unwieldy – will differ from their predecessors in one key respect.While the MDGs theoretically applied to all countries, they were seen in practice as a scorecard for developing countries.The SDGs, though, are explicitly universal and every country will be expected to show commitment to and progress towards them.

Will that universal pressure force concerted action that is truly global?We will see just how loudly the words of Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, resonate in the ears of world leaders between now and 2030: “This is the people's agenda, a plan of action for ending poverty in all its dimensions,irreversibly, everywhere, and leaving no one behind.”

Answer 1

1) The pronoun "they"refers to the new world leaders.

2) "their prececessors"refer to the former world leaders who agreed a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity fifteen years ago.