UN Millennium Development Goals Video Series


Life 4 Millennium Goals Video Series
located in the Media Center call number: JZ 1318 .L54 2005

1. The Millennium Development Goals: Dream or Reality
   Explores the ambition and scope of the UN's Millennium Development Goals, and the obstacles to their achievement.
   "Ours is the very first generation in history that had the possibility and the ability to feed every hungry person on earth," says Professor Adil Najam. "We had the technology, we had the food -- we just didn't have the will. And that's where the MDGs come in."
   
   At the turn of the new millennium, the world looked forward to an end to absolute poverty, avoidable disease, oppression of women and children without education. The United Nations embodied these hopes in a series of eight targets -- the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This introductory program to the series intercuts sequences from China, Bangladesh, Jamaica, India, Sri Lanka, Zambia and Ethiopia with comment from key academics and activists, to explore the ambition and scope of each of the individual MDGs, and the obstacles to their achievement.
   
   
2. The Real Leap Forward: Scaling Up Poverty Reduction in China
   Reports on China's successful efforts to reduce poverty through development and targeted programs.
   
   China is fast becoming one of the world's industrial powerhouses. But hundreds of millions of Chinese still live in poverty, far from the coastal regions generating the new wealth. As elsewhere in the world, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. The Chinese government is trying to address the problem -- through targeted poverty reduction programs. As Lu Fei Jie, Director General of China's State Council Leading Group on Poverty, sums it up, it is more than just a relief program - "we do not just supply money. We focus on helping people to improve their capabilities to develop the areas by themselves. To improve their basic living and work conditions. That way they can walk out of poverty forever." The Real Leap Forward reports on China's efforts to spread the new social benefits beyond the city limits-- and asks how well they're succeeding.
   
   
3. Listen to the Kids!
   A Unicef intitiative involves children in decisions that affect their own futures, their families and communities.
   
   One in five of the world's population is aged between 12 and 18. In developing countries, where the percentage is much higher, children and young people often carry a huge burden of responsibility yet rarely are their views taken into account. This Life program reports on a Unicef initiative to involve children in decisions that affect their own futures, their families and communities.
   
   From post-conflict Sri Lanka to the back-streets of New Delhi children are campaigning to be heard: street children forming the Children's Council in New Delhi, a teenage photographer campaigning for girls to be able to stay in school in Bangladesh, a sixteen year-old fighting discrimination against HIV/AIDS sufferers in Nepal.
   
   
4. Helping Ourselves!
   In India, two community projects help people move out of poverty and gain control of their lives.
   
   Over the last 25 years India has cut absolute poverty by half. Still 440 million people live on less than a dollar a day. This Life program looks at two projects that are helping Indian communities move out of poverty - in line with the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015 - and that have succeeded in giving previously powerless people some control over their lives. In Karnataka, the IT revolution has allowed farmers to access land deeds vital to obtaining credit with which they can sow next year's harvest. In Andhra Pradesh, women's self-help groups have enabled rural women to change aspects of their lives, and given them a voice in local government.
   
   
5. Reaching Out to the Grassroots
   Education and community-driven development combat poverty in Bangladesh and Indonesia.
   
   Shilmundi is a village in the vast Delta in the south of Bangladesh. The children here attend a local school, and come together to study after hours, a sign of their enthusiasm for learning. But the real question is how long they'll be able to continue. This program looks at two very different approaches to improving the lives of poor people -- one through education, as in the Shilmundi project in Bangladesh, the other through what's known as "community-driven development" in Indonesia.
   
   Life asks whether projects like these can be replicated in other countries trying to meet the targets of the Millennium Development Goals of halving the number of people living in poverty by 2015.
   
   
6. Staying Alive!
   Poverty combined with lack of education and health services affect maternal mortality rates in Bangladesh.
   
   Life visits Bangladesh to find out how the country is planning to cut the maternal mortality rate by three quarters by the year 2015. Every year, a recent WHO report shows, 529,000 women worldwide die in childbirth and pregnancy. Nearly all of these preventable deaths occur in developing countries, where problems of poverty, combined with lack of health and education services, make motherhood a dangerous undertaking. For over 20 years, the international community has pledged itself to improving maternal health. But until recently there has been very little progress. Now, in the Millennium Development Goals, 189 countries have renewed their commitment to reduce maternal mortality by 75 per cent by 2015. In Bangladesh, 50 women die during pregnancy or in childbirth every day. Will Bangladesh be able to deliver its promises to cut maternal mortality figures by three-quarters by 2015.
   
   
7. When the Cows Come Home
   Despite the success of the "Jamaica Hope" milk cow, Jamaica's dairy industry is facing a crisis, as EU trade undercuts island production.
   
   Away from the beaches and resorts there's another rural Jamaica, struggling to make ends meet on farming. Milk is part of the staple diet of the 2.6 million people living in Jamaica. But dairy production is difficult in tropical climates. Most of the island's milk was imported until early 20th century breeders helped produce a dairy cow that could withstand the island's heat and tropical diseases. They called the breed the Jamaica Hope. But despite the success of the breed, the Jamaican dairy industry is facing a crisis. Jamaica's steps toward sustainable rural development is threatened. This edition of Life looks at how -- with cruel irony -- the Jamaica Hope is under threat from subsidized European Dairy Farmers and ask how Europe's agricultural policies squares with its commitment to the Millennium Development Goal.
   
   
8. The Coffee-Go-Round
   Many coffee-producing countries like Ethiopia are facing economic disaster even as the demand for coffee increases world-wide.
   
   Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world - a major cash crop for many poor, developing countries trying to trade their way out of poverty. Coffee promises to increase developing countries' share of income from agricultural products on world markets - in line with Millennium Development Goal No 8's commitment to a global partnership for development. But for the last 10 years the international coffee industry has been in crisis - and many coffee-producing countries are facing disaster. The world's 25 million coffee farmers receive less than one per cent of the price of a cup of coffee sold in a coffee bar. Life visits Ethiopia, the cradle of coffee cultivation, and speaks to players in the international coffee trade to find out how individual coffee growers can survive the boom and bust of the global coffee market.
   
   
9. Aiming High
   Focuses on Uganda's successful economic recovery in the wake of Idi Amin's regime.
   
   In 1986 Uganda was bankrupt - a byword for corruption and economic mismanagement. Six years of civil war in this former British colony in East Africa had followed the ousting of former President Idi Amin and its social and state institutions were near collapse. But today Uganda's economy is widely seen as a success story and over the last ten years the number of Ugandans living in absolute poverty has been cut by half. This edition of Life looks at how Uganda has achieved this remarkable turnaround, and questions whether the country could now be on course to meet the Millennium Development Goal by 2015.
   
   
10. Whose Agenda Is It Anyway?
    To fulfill the Millennium Development Goals, many poor countries are now implementing "Poverty Reduction Strategy Programs".
    
    To fulfil the Millennium Development Goals, many poor countries are now implementing Poverty Reduction Strategy Programs -- PRSPs. They are supposed to be "home grown", developed by both government and civil society and emphasize pro-poor economic growth. But in Malawi, PRSPs are viewed by many as merely a new version of old World Bank policies, with decisions ultimately being made in Washington, rather than by the country's own citizens. This Life report investigates the PRSP process and its effectiveness in Malawi. We interview Malawian government officials, civil society campaigners, World Bank economists and critics of World Bank policies, as well as visiting rural communities to ask how they themselves would eliminate their own poverty.
    
    
11. Geraldo's Brazil
    Five years later, Life rejoins a Brazilian factory worker affected by the globalized economy.
    
    Life examines the effects of globalization through the story of Geraldo Da Souza, a worker at Ford in Sao Paolo, Brazil. In 1999, he was among 2000 workers laid off from his factory during the "international financial crisis". Life filmed him then, trying to work out the connection between the financial crises in Asia, Russia and Brazil and understand the impact of globalization. In this film we will look at the effects of globalization over the past 5 years through Geraldo's life and eyes. And we examine how institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have been dealing with a government which had in mind not to pay its external debt.
    
    
12. Yemeni Futures
    More than a decade after its unification, Yemen is still struggling to improve the standard of living.
    
    In 1990 Yemen became a single country, with the unification of the Yemen Arab Republic in the North and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen in the South.
    
    It was hailed as a move that would bring prosperity to the country. 42% of the population live in poverty. Only a quarter of the people live in cities and outside the urban areas population density is low. This makes it difficult to provide healthcare, education and basic infrastructure. This Life program asks what is being done to address fundamental needs of the Yemeni people, and whether anything has been achieved since the unification in 1990 to raise the quality of their lives.
    
    
13. Crisis Control: Stemming the Spread of HIV/AIDS
    Ukraine's emerging HIV epidemic is contrasted with Africa's longstanding HIV/AIDS catastrophe.
    
    Worldwide, 42 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS. 90 percent of them live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But while world attention has been focused on Africa's longstanding HIV/AIDS catastrophe, new crisis regions are emerging. Ukraine has one of the fastest growing infection rates in the world - an epidemic waiting to happen, unless urgent action is taken. Life visits the former Soviet Republic and Zambia, to find out if Eastern European countries like Ukraine can learn from Africa's experience in fighting AIDS - before it's too late.
    
    
14. Educating Yaprak
    Turkey's ambitious campaign to reduce poverty includes convincing reluctant parents to send their daughters to school.
    
    At the crossroads of Asia and Europe, Turkey is a country with a large, young population. But literacy rates have traditionally lagged behind neighboring Greece and Bulgaria. With its sights firmly set on future EU membership, Turkey has identified education as key to reducing poverty. So Turkey has embarked on an ambitious campaign, targeting those most deprived of education - young teenage girls - especially from the poor rural areas. Life visits Turkey's eastern Province of Van and meets 13-year-old Yaprak, just one of the many targeted by this massive education drive. She, for one, is sure of the benefits. "I want to study until the end. I want to finish university. I want to have a job."
    
    
15. Brazil's Land Revolution
    In the state of Bahia, a new initiative encourages the landless to band together to buy up land -- with low-interest government loans.
    
    In Brazil, almost half of the agricultural land is owned by just one per cent of the population. The government estimates that land reform would benefit some 4.5 million families - both agricultural workers and city slum-dwellers. Although successive governments have backed the policy, political opposition has so far prevented any meaningful progress. Now Brazil's President, Luiz Ignazio Lula da Silva, has announced plans to resettle more than 100,000 landless families this year, and promised an extra US$500 million towards agrarian reform over the next two years. Life visits the Northeastern state of Bahia to report on an initiative, which encourages the landless to club together to buy up land, with low-interest government loans.
    
    
16. How Green Is My Valley?
    Documents efforts to revitalize the polluted, impoverished communities in the former coal and steel producing valleys of South Wales.
    
    The valleys of South Wales once produced much of the coal and steel which powered industrial development in Britain - and worldwide. Today those industries are gone. Their legacy is a polluted pocket of poverty - 180,000 people nestled in the steep-sided windswept valleys of Caerphilly County; where the highest rates for chronic emphysema, cancer, heart disease, asthma, poor housing and sanitation, low birth weight and accidental death combine to mean that people living here suffer the highest mortality rates in Western Europe. There are schemes to regenerate the entire area - health projects, with incentives, working groups, investment and employment strategies - but are these really working and what more can be done to lift this community out of its depression?
    
    
17. Warming Up in Mongolia
    Unless sustainable alternatives are introduced, Mongolia's dependence on fossil fuels and rapid urbanization threatens the environment.
    
    Ulaan Baatar is the coldest capital city in the world, with winter lasting for seven months of the year. Following the collapse of communist rule in 1991, increasing numbers of Mongolians are moving into the city, where they mostly live in sprawling, polluted and unplanned slums. Today the Mongolian Government is working with international development agencies in an attempt to ensure a sustainable transition into the modern world. This Life film looks at how Mongolia is powering itself. All electricity produced in Mongolia comes from fossil fuels. What can be done to repair environmental damage and introduce sustainable alternatives? Life examines the long-term environmental implications of exhausting Mongolia's natural resources - global warming, environmental degradation, desertification - and asks, what clean technological solutions are there to Mongolia's problems?
    
    
18. This Hard Ground: Remembering the Displaced
    Civil war leads to the internal displacement of millions in Sri Lanka.
    
    Away from the idyllic, tropical paradise beaches of Sri Lanka, a civil war has been raging for the last twenty years. Jaffna, once a thriving port in the north of the island, is now a decimated skeleton of a city: buildings flattened by bombs, homes shot out and deserted. During the course of the war, 800,000 people were forced to leave their homes and all their possessions. Even though they were displaced within their own country, they have lost everything: their livelihoods, their community and often their families. This Life program examines the fragile peace and what it means to people who have fled because of the fighting. We talk to the Sri Lankan army, the government and NGOs and ask what are the prospects for a long-term political settlement and lasting peace?
    
    
19. Blue Danube?
    Connecting more than 18 countries in Western Europe, the Danube River is at the heart of a dilemma over shared resources in the growing European Union.
    
    The Danube is Western Europe's longest river, running nearly 2800 kilometers from the Black Forest in Germany to the Black Sea. It is the world's most international river connecting 18 countries. The Danube and its tributaries comprise a river basin that covers one-tenth of continental Europe. But with the expansion of the European Union into Eastern Europe, it's at the heart of a very modern dilemma - how to create prosperity through trade and development without destroying the environment. This Life program examines the legacies of communist rule and conflict in the region, and asks what are the consequences when more than one country shares what a river has to offer? It is the story of how the Danube has become a new battleground in the conflict between the EU's transport and agriculture lobbies, and environmentalists fighting to preserve the river's unique ecology.
    
    
20. Between War and Peace
    The United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in Liberia encourages combatants to turn in their weapons and wage peace.
    
    Liberia, Africa's oldest republic, was relatively calm until 1980 when William Tolbert was overthrown by Sergeant Samuel Doe after food price riots. By the late 1980s, arbitrary rule and economic collapse culminated in civil war when dissidents of Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front overran much of the countryside and executed Doe. Over half of the population fled their homes in terror during its long and bloody civil war. After 14 years of anarchy, the international community has arrived in force in an attempt to stabilize the country. Many see this as Liberia's last chance. With more than 59,000 fighters (some of them children) demobilized in the last three months and another 15,000 waiting to follow, this Life program reports on Liberia's attempts to find a way of engaging the former fighters in rebuilding their country - to sustain the peace.
    
    
21. Reel to Real: Balancing Acts
    Explores the international movement for women's rights.
    
    In 1994, 179 government leaders attending the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development signed a groundbreaking agreement aimed at improving the lives of women worldwide. Balancing Acts -- the first in a duo of Life programs made in collaboration with women broadcasters and producers around the world to mark the 10th anniversary of that conference -- explores how women from very different cultures, often faced with extremes of inequality, are taking on the status quo. Individual stories look at how Afghani women refugees are returning to pick up the pieces of their lives in Kabul; the feisty female entrepreneurs of Nigeria known as "Mama Benz" who, despite owning an estimated 50 per cent of the country's small businesses, are denied recognition of their contribution to the economy; a teenager battling purdah to get an education in Pakistan; and the "inherited widows" who are challenging convention in Kenya. Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN Commissioner for Human Rights, provides an overview of the state of women's rights worldwide - and why they are so crucial to social and economic development.
    
    
22. Reel to Real: Holding Our Ground
    International efforts to assure reproductive health and rights conflict with cultural realities in the Philippines, Latvia, Japan, and India.
    
    Holding Our Ground focuses on one of the most contested of the agreements hammered out in Cairo: reproductive rights. The right of both women and men to decide freely if and when to get married, and if, when and how often to have children, was enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights over 50 years ago. But 10 years after the Cairo agreement, it's still far from universally acknowledged. The program features reports from: the Philippines, now at the epicenter of the battle over efforts to restrict information on, and access to, family planning; Latvia, where taboos surrounding the subject of sex still hamper efforts to provide information for adolescents; Japan, where the falling birthrate is focusing attention again on the problems of childcare for working women; and finally India, where - despite laws designed to protect the girl child - the practice of female infanticide, and its horrendous repercussions, appears to be growing. Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of the UN Population Fund, describes why reproductive health and rights are critical for development worldwide.
    
    
23. Return to Srebrenica
    Survivors of the massacre in Srebrenica struggle to heal their community and build a new future.
    
    Srebrenica is a traditionally Muslim town in the north east of Bosnia. In July 1995 it became the site of the worst massacre in Europe since World War Two - a symbol of the horror of the Balkan wars. After a three-year siege, Serb armed forces entered the town and, over the following four days, massacred between 7000 and 8000 Muslim civilians, mostly men and boys. Another 35,000 Muslims, mostly women and children, were driven out into other parts of Bosnia. Now international aid, and the burials of victims of the massacres, are part of a process allowing the town to move forward, and begin to build a new future. The story of Srebrenica today, a town slowly reconciling itself to its past, unfolds through interviews with returning refugees, and those who can't face ever going back; with the International Commission for Missing People; with EU Ambassador Michael Humphries; and with Lord Paddy Ashdown, internationally appointed administrator of Bosnia.
    
    
24. In The Wake of War
    A burgeoning grassroots peace movement in Burundi is aimed at ending civil war between the Tutsis and Hutus.
    
    Philippe Mvuyekure has spent the last five years living in a refugee camp in Tanzania. Now, he's on his way home. He's among thousands of refugees convinced that the bitter, 10-year civil war that decimated his homeland of Burundi may be coming to an end. The civil war here between Hutu rebels and the Tutsi-dominated army uprooted over a million people and killed more than 300,000. But the benefits of a peace process are finally beginning to emerge. Using traditional mediation systems and peacemakers, Burundi is introducing innovative peace and reconciliation projects. The aim is to start a grass roots movement to bring a lasting peace to Burundi and its long-suffering citizens. This program examines the future for Burundi, for power sharing and for a rapprochement between warring factions.
    
    
25. Returning Dreams
    In the aftermath of Liberia's civil war children are fighting to reclaim their futures and return home.
    
    Fourteen-year old Jemoh fled from Liberia when she was 11, and has been living in a refugee camp in Sierra Leone for the last three years. Now she is about to join one of the first and biggest UNHCR convoys to return to Liberia for three years. This Life program follows Jemoh's long journey home, and the mixed picture she finds when she gets there. Jemoh's just one of the millions of children caught up in the world's conflicts. Some are forced to fight and kill; others are used as slaves and "wives". Those that survive are left brutalized and traumatized. How, the program asks, do you rehabilitate children who have gone through these kinds of experiences? To mark the 15th anniversary of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, Life returns to Sierra Leone and Liberia, to assess the fate of children caught up in their recent civil war.
    
    
26. The Hospice
    Workers at the Mother of Mercy hospice in Zambia provide palliative care for those afflicted with AIDS.
    
    The Mother of Mercy Hospice on the edge of the capital, Lusaka, was the first of its kind in Zambia. "Our idea was just to build a simple shelter so people can die with dignity," says Sister Leonia. 200 people a day in Zambia die from HIV/AIDS. Because controlling HIV/AIDS is one of the biggest challenges world health experts face, all the member countries of the United Nations have pledged to "reverse" the spread of the disease as one of the UN's Millennium Development Goals - a global ambition the international community hopes to achieve by 2015. This Life film follows the work of the staff and volunteers at the Mother of Mercy hospice and in the surrounding villages. The courage of patients, the resilience and despair of the staff and the dignity of how they all deal with the almost daily ritual of death combine to give a poignant account of the human face of AIDS in modern Africa.
    
    
27. Slum Futures
    The slums of Mumbai are an important microcosm of how slums are developing around the world.
    
    Bombay -- now known as Mumbai -- is the home of Bollywood movies and India's city of gold, its financial capital. But behind the glitz and glamour lurks a different reality -- a city landscape dominated by massive, sprawling slums, which rank among the biggest in the world. According to Mumbai's city housing authority, eight out of the twelve million people in Mumbai live in the slums. Mumbai's slum dwellers are, however, a vibrant and proud community, and the city is also an important microcosm of how slums are developing around the world. Globally one in six people live in slums. At the current rate of growth, UN-Habitat predicts that by 2030, one in every three people in the world could be living in a slum.