Millennium Development Goal regions and UNICEF regions

This site presents education statistics from the perspective of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The second of the eight Millennium Development Goals calls for universal primary education by 2015. The third MDG calls for the elimination of gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005 and at all levels of education by 2015.

To monitor progress toward the eight MDG, the UN has divided all countries into ten regional groupings, shown in the map below. The list of countries within each region is available on the official UN site for the MDG indicators. The abbreviations in the map's legend stand for these regions:
  • Developed countries (DEV)
  • Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)
  • Eastern Asia (EA)
  • South-eastern Asia (SEA)
  • Oceania (OCE)
  • Southern Asia (SA)
  • Western Asia (WA)
  • Northern Africa (NA)
  • Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)
  • Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)
Millennium Development Goal regions
Map of the world with Millennium Development Goal regions
Source: UN Statistics Division web site, August 2006

Future posts on global education statistics will refer to the MDG regions for regionally disaggregated data. In previous posts, for example on primary school enrollment, global education statistics were presented with the regional groupings used by UNICEF. UNICEF divides all countries into eight regions, shown in the following map. The countries within each region are listed on the UNICEF web site.

UNICEF regions
Map of the world with UNICEF regions
Source: UNICEF web site, August 2006

The abbreviations stand for these regions:
  • Industrialized countries (IND)
  • Central and Eastern Europe, Commonwealth of Independent States (CEE/CIS)
  • East Asia and the Pacific (EAP)
  • South Asia (SA)
  • Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
  • Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA)
  • West and Central Africa (WCA)
  • Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)
A comparison of the two maps shows that UNICEF combines three MDG regions (Eastern Asia, South-eastern Asia, Oceania) in a larger region called East Asia and the Pacific. Northern Africa is combined with Western Asia, Iran, and Sudan in the UNICEF region Middle East and North Africa. On the other hand, the MDG refer to one region for Sub-Saharan Africa, while UNICEF divides this region into Eastern and Southern Africa, and West and Central Africa. Three other regions are largely identical: the developed or industrialized countries, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

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Friedrich Huebler, 20 August 2006 (edited 26 March 2011), Creative Commons License.
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2006/08/millennium-development-goal-regions.html

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