U.N. Millennium Development Goals
Focusing on the World's Most Pressing Problems

In 2000, 189 leaders from the world’s developed and developing countries launched an unprecedented effort to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people by eradicating poverty and its accompanying factors: hunger, disease, the lack of medical care, education and the empowerment of women.

The resulting eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) formed a blueprint for international cooperation and declared a worldwide mandate for change, with the goals to be met by the year 2015.

The Millennium Development Goals:
1) Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2) Achieve universal primary education
3) Promote gender equality and empower women
4) Reduce child mortality
5) Improve maternal health
6) Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7) Ensure environmental sustainability
8) Develop a global partnership for development

Clearly, the MDGs are interrelated; improved maternal health can reduce child mortality, and environmental sustainability can protect the supply of clean water, thereby combating disease. The goal of the United Nation’s MDG plan is to have the flexibility to take into consideration factors at a regional level and concentrate efforts where they are needed most.

Both ambitious and practical, the MDGs can only be attained by the cooperative efforts of local initiatives, NGOs and government institutions working together to share expertise and resources.

This is exactly the model PCI-Media Impact has used since its inception in 1985. In keeping with the MDGs, PCI-Media Impact has recently expanded the scope of its current entertainment-education programming to include a broader range of topics, yet with one specific purpose: to improve and save lives.

The Importance of Media and Development

One of the challenges in meeting the MDGs is to provide information and an impetus for change on the individual level. The men, women and young people whose lives are affected must themselves be instrumental in bringing about and sustaining change. Reaching them effectively is the challenge.

Many poor, rural communities in the developing world do not have access to television, internet, newspapers and magazines. Where literacy rates are low and outside contact through media or travel is limited, educational opportunities and an exchange of new ideas are lacking. Community radio programming provides an inexpensive and readily accessible means for reaching people in even the poorest communities.

PCI-Media Impact and its local production partners are working to bring about permanent change on the individual level. Through the use of entertainment-education programming created locally, PCI-Media Impact is providing a viable means of communicating an often difficult or culturally sensitive message in a practical and entertaining format. This is being accomplished through the power of storytelling, “soap operas,” and episodic social dramas that keep listeners tuning in to hear more, and through interactive programming that empowers young people to feel that they have a place in society and a role in shaping their own future.
Through radio programs, PCI-Media Impact is reaching disenfranchised segments of the population and breaking through sexual and cultural borders by providing factual information in a culturally sensitive platform.

In 2007, PCI-Media Impact is providing a message for change, empowerment and the future through 31 programs to people in 9 countries with a potential audience of 40 million men, women and young adults.

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