A. whereas the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have raised awareness that ending global poverty is an urgent challenge and a priority for global action thanks to their limited set of concrete and time-bound targets; whereas, two years from the 2015 target date for the MDGs, there has been significant progress: the target of reducing extreme poverty by half has been reached, as has the target of halving the proportion of people who lack dependable access to improved sources of drinking water, conditions for over 200 million people living in slums have been improved, primary school enrolment of girls now equals that of boys and accel ...[+++]erating progress in reducing child and maternal mortality can be seen; whereas, however, the current MDGs do not sufficiently address the root causes of poverty such as inequalities within and among countries, social exclusion, biodiversity and governance;

The Member States and the managing authorities shall ensure that operational programmes include a detailed analysis of how gender equality is promoted in the programming, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, including specific objectives with clear time lines and any statistics and qualitative and quantitative indicators broken down by sex.

11. Calls on the Commission to instruct Member States to establish roadmaps for meeting the requirements defined in ETAP, which must include deadlines that correspond to the deadlines defined in ETAP and links to the performance targets, so that all major targets are linked and measured at both Member State and EU level and have fixed deadlines;

9. Considers that the gender pay gap is a core priority for adjustment in response to the conclusions of the Stockholm European Council and welcomes the proposal of the Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities to include in the Employment Guidelines for 2002 the establishment of targets with timescales to reduce the gender pay gap; calls on the Commission, within the framework of the European employment strategy, in connection with the employment guidelines, to continue to devote itself to specific measures for combating the wage gap by introducing precise quantitative and timescale objectives; requests it, in monitoring National Acti ...[+++]on Plans for Employment, to draw up actual progress reports concerning equal pay;

In order to carry it through in the context of an "open method of co-ordination" they set a series of objectives and an implementation timetable.

Even if the Commission's examination is not subject to precise deadlines, action should be taken "in the shortest possible time", as provided for in the Directive.