Keeping Pace With MDGs in Rivers

Leadership

23 June 2011

Keeping Pace With MDGs in Rivers

In September 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, world leaders agreed to eight specific and measurable development goals, now called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), to be achieved by 2015. The goals of the MDGs focus on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality and empowering women. Others are reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability and creation of a global partnership for development, with targets for aid, trade, and debt .

The second goal, which is achieving universal primary education, is targeted at ensuring that by 2015, all children can complete the full course of primary schooling for girls and boys.

In Rivers State, the Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi-led administration has not relented in its effort to fulfil the second goal of the MDGs to the letter. Apart from signing into law a bill that has made it a criminal offence for parents and guardians not to send their children and wards to school, Amaechi has already sponsored a bill to the State House of Assembly for a law that provides for equal education for children of both the rich and the poor.