The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are internationally-agreed upon targets that aim to decrease poverty and advance living standards by 2015. Given how wide-ranging and interdependent the MDGs are, engineers play an essential role in achieving these Goals. The eight Goals are as follows:

• Goal One: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

• Goal Two: Achieve universal primary education

• Goal Three: Promote gender equality and empower women

• Goal Four: Reduce child mortality

• Goal Five: Improve maternal health

• Goal Six: Combat diseases including HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

• Goal Seven: Ensure environmental sustainability

• Goal Eight: Develop a global partnership for development 

As mentioned in Engineering: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities for Development (pdf), “community infrastructure is key to alleviating poverty and thus engineers have a vital role to play in all the MDGs” (p. 250). Providing strong and sustainable infrastructure helps increase the welfare of local communities, nations and regions. As a result, the socio-economic development of societies is connected to the engineers who design, create and manage the technologies and the physical infrastructures of societies.

The following table is taken from Engineering: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities for Development (p. 253) and it highlights the connections between physical infrastructures and each MDG.

• Table relating physical infrastructure and the MDGs (pdf)
• Educational resource relating physical infrastructure and the MDGs (pdf)