Introduction

At the World Summit of September 2005, world leaders committed to adopt, by 2006, and implement comprehensive national development strategies to achieve the internationally agreed development goals and objectives, including the Millennium Development Goals. Such “MDG-based poverty reduction strategies” were a core recommendation of Investing in Development.

The UN Millennium Project has worked extensively with countries already engaged in preparing MDG-based poverty reduction strategies. These pages contain a series of hands-on resources that can assist countries undertaking this work. The resources translate the recommendations of the UN Millennium Project and lessons learned through the UN Millennium Project's country advisory work into user-friendly “how-to” formats that will be useful for the wide range of stakeholders involved in these efforts. We hope that countries find these resources useful and will adjust and adapt them to meet particular circumstances and aims.

The Handbook page presents the UN Millennium Project's Preparing National Strategies to Achieve the MDGs: A Handbook. This document provides a practical introduction for anyone interested in national MDG strategies, and a resource for countries undertaking this work. The presentations and excel tools pages provide additional resources on "MDG needs assessments." The presentations page contains presentations that introduce MDG needs assessments and gives suggestive methodologies for several thematic areas. The excel tools page comprises a set of needs assessment tools that can be used by countries to develop their own MDG needs assessments. To do so these "models" may need to be tailored to each country's specific needs.

Any questions or comments regarding MDG needs assessments should be sent to info@unmillenniumproject.org