Another report says that Vietnam has met MDG #1

We are seeing a lot of reports and studies being issued now just before next week's United Nations Millennium Development Goal conference. International aid organizations, charities and more are giving the heads of state some data before the summit to hopefully guide them into action.

The next report we would like to mention comes from a British think-tank. The Overseas Development Institute says that Vietnam and Ghana are leading the way in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. This echos a report we saw yesterday from Oxfam.

From this AFP article that we found at ABS-CBN news, we read more about MDG achievers.

On the positive side, Vietnam had made "unprecedented progress" in improving the lives of the poor, said the report.

The Asian country had managed to halve the proportion of underweight children and reduce the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day from nearly two-thirds to one-fifth in 14 years, said the institute.

Ghana had reduced hunger by nearly three-quarters -- from 34 percent to nine percent between 1990 and 2004 -- an area in which it had outperformed all other countries around the world.

It is on course to achieve the Millennium goal of halving rates of poverty and hunger by 2015, said the think-tank.

Ten African countries -- including Ethiopia, Egypt and Angola -- had already halved their poverty levels, according to the ODI.

But the institute warned: "In other areas progress has been slower, or even reversed, and challenges remain in a number of countries."

It highlighted great variations in HIV infection rates across Africa and uneven progress in tackling hunger and poverty across Latin America.