Kohonen Self-Organizing Maps as a Tool for Assessing Progress toward the Millennium Development Goals.

This paper uses Kohonen Self-Organizing Maps to assess the progress of the United Nations (UN)’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from 2000-2008 for three world regions: Africa, Asia and Latin America. We observe in each region a handful of noteworthy countries in each region - Ghana, Senegal, China, Vietnam, India, and Brazil that made good progress. Major statistical differences exist within Africa that separates the northern and southern regions from the eastern and western regions and also from each other. In contrast, Latin America and Asia are largely homogeneous in the MDG measures with the exceptions of Afghanistan, Haiti, and Bolivia. The substantial differences between Africa and the other continents (and indeed within Africa itself) appear to be attributable to deficiencies in education and ICT infrastructure, both of which we argue are imperative for progress toward other goals.