|
|
DEVELOPMENT: Global Campaign Calls for Tackling the Roots of Poverty
By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, May 5 (IPS) - The Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP)
made a commitment in Uruguay Saturday to extend their campaign until 2015,
and to emphasise the structural causes that determine that over one
billion people in the world are living in extreme poverty.
GCAP was launched in 2005, at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre,
Brazil, as a one-year project, after which it was extended for another year, to 2007.
Now its component organisations have committed themselves to continuing
the campaign until the 2015 deadline established by United Nations member
countries to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and
suffering from hunger, from 1990 levels.
That is the first of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted
by the international community in 2000, which include commitments to
specific targets to improve health, education, gender equality, the
environment and sustainable development.
At the international meeting that brought together 150 leading activists
which ran Thursday through Saturday in the Uruguayan capital, GCAP decided
to "highlight the causes of poverty, with a particular emphasis on the
groups specifically affected by social exclusion," such as women,
indigenous peoples and other sectors that suffer discrimination, Ana
Agostino, a member of the GCAP International Facilitation Group, told IPS.
The need for this focus was stressed by Latin American and Caribbean
organisations, with the support of the Asia Group and women's
organisations, said Agostino, a member of GCAP's Feminist Task Force.
"There was an intense debate on whether or not to include sexual
orientation when referring to excluded groups, because GCAP is
characterised by great diversity," with hundreds of non-governmental
organisations and social movements from around the world, said Agostino.
Religious associations were opposed to including sexual orientation, and
in the end the activists agreed to not specifically mention the question
with respect to concrete measures and actions, which will be left up to
each country to decide.
In 2006, GCAP and the U.N. Millennium Campaign promoted an initiative
called "Stand Up Against Poverty", in which 23.5 million people around the
world "stood up" on Oct. 17, the International Day for the Eradication of
Poverty and made the Guinness Book of World Records. In 2007 they hope to
mobilise 50 million people, under the slogan "Stand Up and Speak Out."
The "Stand Up" action in 2006 had little impact in Latin America. One of
the reasons, according to activists consulted at the time by IPS, was that
the region's own priorities and agenda were not sufficiently taken into
account.
In some countries, "nothing happened; it basically passed unnoticed," said
Agostino.
This year, the aim is for each country and region to adopt their own
"political messages" to promote participation in the coordinated Oct. 17
activities, among other measures aimed at increasing visibility of the
event, said the activist.
The Latin American and Caribbean national coalitions and networks in GCAP
said in San Salvador on Apr. 13 that the campaign should promote a view of
poverty based on justice, not charity.
This should involve not handouts for the poor, but ensuring the conditions
for the full enjoyment of civil rights, without discrimination of any
kind, said the activists meeting in the Salvadoran capital.
The future of GCAP will only be sustainable if there is clarity about its
political objective, which should be the basis for developing its
strategies, and if mechanisms are adopted to democratise the way it works
and make decision-making transparent, said the San Salvador statement.
The conference in Montevideo ended with the participants "in high
spirits," and with a "strong sense of reaffirmation of the validity of
their campaign," said Agostino.
The activists decided to maintain their decision not to "institutionalise"
the coalition and to meet every three years, until 2015, to assess the progress of their actions against poverty.
GCAP achieved peak visibility in 2005, when it devoted its energies to
extracting concrete commitments from the Group of Eight (G8) most powerful
countries in the world, at their meeting in Scotland that year.
Although the G8 promised on that occasion to increase aid to developing
countries by up to 50 billion dollars by 2010, in fact development aid
from rich countries fell by five percent in 2006, according to a report by
the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which was
published in April.
(END/2007)
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
What is RSS?
