DEVELOPMENT: UN Chief Calls for 2010 MDG Targets

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ravi Kanth Devarakonda

DAVOS, Jan 26 2008 (IPS) - UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon has called on world leaders to agree some 2010 milestones towards achieving the 2015 Millennium Development Goals.

The early target would include lifting 75 million people out of extreme poverty in Africa, admitting 25 million more children in school, saving four million more children’s lives, providing skilled health personnel for attending 35 million births, and providing access to drinking water for 70 million people.

Ban ki-Moon said only 30 percent progress has been achieved until now. “Without extraordinary effort we will fail to achieve the MDGS,” he said. The MDGs are a set of goals agreed in 2000, with 2015 as a cut-off date for several specific achievements.

The targets include halving the number of people living in absolute poverty (currently over 1 billion), universal primary education, promotion of gender equality and empowering women, reduction of infant and maternal mortality by two-thirds, halting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and ensuring significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020, and achieving a global partnership for development.

Ban ki-Moon described progress on the MDGs as “a development emergency” at a special WEF session called to discuss the goals. Others who took part in the special session were Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Nigeria’s President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Jordon’s queen Rania al-Abdullah, Microsoft chief Bill Gates, and rock star Bono.

Ban ki-Moon said the world must “rededicate” 2008 for addressing the problems of a billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. For once, the movers and shakers of global business and politics moved away from their profit-oriented concerns to the problems of the deprived. But little was agreed.

Bono was strongly critical of the failure to address the MDGs. “The time for ‘moral compact’ and ‘moral’ persuasion to fulfil the MDGs is well over,” he said. He asked whether the corporate world and governments are ready to accept “legally binding commitments to fulfil the MDGs by 2015.”

Bono, who is leading the ‘Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa’ (DATA) campaign, made a “call to action on the Millennium Development Goals.”

But there was no response to Bono’s call for legal commitments. The only agreement so far is to convene a UN special session in September to address the tardy implementation of the Millennium Development Goals.

There was no dearth of renewed calls for more action. Prime Minister Brown said he will convene a meeting of the global private sector in May to announce new measures to support the MDGs. Bill Gates called for concerted action both by the private sector and governments.

Kumi Naidoo, secretary-general of the civil society group Civicus which is at the forefront of the Global Call to Action against Poverty, said issues relating to poverty do not get the same treatment as the financial and banking market crisis, which dominated Davos 2008.

“There are double standards in addressing the problems arising from the United States as compared to the deathly conditions in Africa,” he told IPS.