To achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the countries have to make them operational - explicitly incorporating their targets and time horizons into key economic policy decisions, national planning documents, and requests for development assistance. Development partners, for their part, must provide the financial and technical support these bold strategies deserve.
Handbooks and Toolkits are available to help to prepare these strategies.
 | Preparing National Strategies to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, A Handbook To better understand how countries can design ambitious national strategies to meet the MDGs, the UN Millennium Project has had the privilege to work with several governments that took on this challenge. Governments led the way with support from UN country teams and participation from civil society organizations, development partners, and other key stakeholders. In Africa the UN Millennium Project's MDG Centre in Nairobi has played a critical role in the effort to operationalize the MDGs. In the process, each country charted unknown territory, teaching the world invaluable lessons on how to craft and implement MDG-based national development strategies. As resolved at the 2005 World Summit, the challenge for the coming year will be to replicate and adapt such bold national efforts in countries around the world. |
 | Making the MDGs Matter: A Country Perspective The UNDG Survey on the Country Response to the MDGs sought the perceptions of UN Country Teams (UNCTs) concerning major changes taking place "on the ground" across a broad range of issues. A conceptual framework describing how this response might unfold was used to design the survey questionnaire and interpret the feedback received. The message from UNCTs is, at its broadest level, in line with expectations: there is some movement on the ground but no breakthrough yet in the effort to achieve the MDGs. There is also much in the detail of their responses which provides a better understanding of challenges at country level and, in a number of significant cases, unsettles the conventional wisdom, most notably about Africa. |
 | How-to-Guide MDG - Based National Development Strategies Over the past few years, UNDP has worked to advocate and monitor the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in national development. This "how-to" guide consolidates the efforts of UN Country Teams (UNCTs) by presenting a step-by-step approach to support country counterparts in MDG-based national development strategies. It recognizes the extensive contributions of all development partners to achieving MDG outcomes. The guide adds to the array of MDG resources created by the family of UN agencies, the European Commission (EC) and other bilateral and multilateral donors by focusing on the institutions and processes upon which sustainable development rests. It provides the "how to" for strengthening the analytical and institutional capacities needed to put countries in the driver's seat. |
 | Millennium Development Goals Needs Assessments In attempt to identify the range of interventions and investments required to achieve the MDGs in a cross-section of countries, this paper presents five country case studies for Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda. The ambition of these country studies is to outline how countries could identify their MDG needs and to inform long term plans for achieving the MDGs. To this end, the paper proposes a template for conducting needs assessments with as much rigor as possible. |
| This is a collection of training materials on the Millennium Development Goals. It is designed to strengthen capacity within UN Country Teams and provide them with training tools on the MDGs that they can use both inside and outside their team. The different tools provided can be used to train UN staff as well as others. |
