This video from some of our advisors - Jeff Sachs, Sakiko Fukuda Parr and Salil Shetty - gives an introduction to the Millennium Development Goals, a set of goals set back in 2000 by the world’s leaders. They came together to create the Millennium Development Goals, eight goals designed to halve extreme poverty by 2015.

These eight goals provide a clear, practical and target led framework for what needs to be done to reduce poverty. Things like reducing hunger, getting all kids into school, improving maternal health, ensuring people have access to clean drinking water - all of which are covered here on Global Citizen.

These goals give everyone working towards reducing extreme poverty – citizens, governments, charities, international organisations and businesses – a common framework and language, helping coordinate efforts. They’re an important set of goals, but they also only cover some issues. As they were set by political agreement, there were some issues that were left out – disability, corruption, secondary schooling to name just a few.

We like to think of the Millennium Development Goals as the basic building blocks for ending extreme poverty. We absolutely need to achieve them, and then we need to go even further.