Promises to Keep - Crafting Better Development Goals

"The United Nations has always had lots of targets, goals, and  declarations. You probably didn’t know, for example, that 2014 is the International Year of Family Farming and the International Year of Crystallography—or that you are currently  living through the Decade of Action for Road Safety. Such initiatives  often reflect good intentions but rarely prove consequential. Between  1950 and 2000, at least 12 un resolutions called for some form of universal
education. In 1961, the so-called Addis Ababa Plan pledged that primary schooling in Africa would be “universal, compulsory and free” within  two decades. Twenty years later, nearly half of all African children  were still out of school. Countless other efforts promised equally  lofty achievements, from gender equality to world peace, that never materialized", by BJORN LOMBORG