Toward Poverty Reduction and Achieving Millennium Development Goals in the Republic of Macedonia

By adopting the Millennium Declaration the Republic of Macedonia committed itself to reducing the poverty, to ensuring a quality primary education and sustained environment, to improving gender balance and reducing infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, and to lowering maternal and child mortality. Having accepted the Millennium Declaration, Macedonia is committed to fight for eradication of the most severe poverty forms, for providing comprehensive primary education, promotion of gender equality, reduction of infant mortality rate, creation of conditions for improving the health status of mothers, undertaking of decisive measures against HIF/AIDS, malaria, and other serious diseases, as well as to ensuring environmental sustainability and global partnership for development. The basic goal of the Economic programme, adopted by the Government, is to create conditions and presumptions for higher economic growth, and new job openings. Therefore, a heavy emphasis is laid on the business climate improvement, introduction of one-stop shop, benefits for the exporting companies in accordance with the World Trade Organization principles, promotion of small and medium-sized enterprises, speeding-up of the bankruptcy procedures, attracting foreign investors, building inexpensive apartments, as well as health insurance entitlements for all the citizens in the country from June 2009. By implementing the Economic Programme, conditions shall be created conducive to a more successful medium term achievement of the MDG. To overcome problems in the educational sphere, the Government developed a Programme for Education Development, which states “one of the key challenges in the coming period will be to raise the level of education of all adolescents and adults, with a special emphasis on the enhancement of the quality of their expert/working and social competencies”. The realization of the Millennium Development Goals is an integral part of these programmes and the MDG indicators should be used in order to measure and evaluate progress.