Shot across 8 countries on 4 continents Nick Danziger returns to the same people he photographed 5 years ago to see how the United Nations Millennium Development Goals are transforming their lives.

In 2000, the United Nations’ eight Millennium Development Goals were put in place, aiming to eliminate poverty, to achieve universal primary education, to reduce child mortality and to improve maternal health, by 2015.

Five years later, in 2005, the photographer Nick Danziger was commissioned by World Vision, the international development and advocacy organization, to create an archive of photographs documenting the lives of women and children in eight countries across the world. The idea was to see if and how their lives would change in the light of the Millennium Development Goals. It was a journey on which he met and photographed women and children with extraordinary personal stories of sacrifice, bravery and hope.

In 2010, Nick retraced his steps to find out what had happened to the women and children he met five years previously. Had the Millennium Development Goals succeeded in giving them any hope for survival? Or had they turned out to be just another PR exercise – unfeasible targets with impossible aims?

None of the stories will leave you unmoved. Several of the people Nick photographed have died; help didn’t arrive for them in time. One, living on the margins of life, has become the biggest entrepreneur her town has ever known, and there are many stories in between of hardscrabble lives battling to overcome the odds to provide a better life for their children.