In two weeks' time, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development will deliver its final report on the UN Millennium Development Goals. The UN General Assembly will take the discussion of global development to a new level when the "post-2015 goals" are debated and outlined. But before that, let us see how we did in accomplishing the MDGs in the last 13 years.

In education, developing regions have made impressive efforts to increase access to primary education, with the adjusted net enrolment rate increasing from 83 percent in 2000 to 90 percent in 2011. In this period, the number of out-of-school children declined by almost half (102 million to 57 million). But the rate of decline is slowing down and we are unlikely to meet the target of universal primary education by 2015.

The situation in Sub-Saharan Africa does not seem as good as in other regions. The region is home to more than half the world's out-of-school children, although the adjusted primary net enrolment rate increased from 60 percent to 77 percent in the 11 years from 2000.