Clean Water for Philippine Poor... and the Value of the Millennium Development Goals

We always hear about how the world is behind in it's achievement of the Millennium Development Goals: how we've missed the opportunity, as a global society, to achieve by 2015, our goals for literacy, gender equality, child health and HIV/AIDS reduction. 

But today, I found some encouragement. 

Today, I start a new job as a reporter for Expat Newspaper, in Manila.   Below the fold on the front page they ran  a story on a government program to train local city government workers to manage water supplies in 36 'waterless' municipalities in the Philippines. 

The article says that this is an effort by the Philippine Government to meet Millenium Development Goal number 7:  the reduction by half of the global population without "access to safe, adequate and sustainable water supply and sanitation." 

The new program will help 122,000 poor households in the Philippines and is funded by the Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund .

The exciting thing for me to is see the goals really used by a government as a roadmap and a benchmark.  While we hold out hope that 2015 will see the reduction in global poverty we've been aiming for, the goals help manage the day to day process of poverty reduction, giving governments and aid agencies a common goal and a clearly defined objectives... and journalists a yardstick by which to measure their success.