Poverty and Disease Remediation in the Millennium Development Goals: Time for Kenya to Set Standards and Thresholds?

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have become a key action-forcing agenda and baseline for performance, goals, targets and indicators (Annan 2005; Johnson 2005; UN 2003, 2001). Several policies, programmes, plans and projects have been created to meet the MDGs and others re-formulated to integrate the MDGs. This paper argues for a need and a conceptual framework to buttress MDGs in national standards and thresholds in order to provide a more comprehensive long-term framework for strategizing, planning and implementation beyond 2015. For convenience MDG targets on poverty and HIV/AIDS are used for illustration although the same argument applies to most MDGs. The key argument is anchored on the concept that standards and thresholds are critical to guiding the strategizing, planning and implementation processes; facilitate a more rationalized decision making process and a cost-effective allocation of resources in the long term. In the context of Part I, the chapter illustrates the importance of international goals in driving progress on key quality of life standards and thresholds.