NEW YORK 20-22 Sep 2010 UN chief hosts Millennium Development Goals summit

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hosts the United Nations High-level Plenary Meeting on the Millennium Development Goals, also referred to as the MDG summit, with the aim of accelerating progress towards all the MDGs by 2015. Pakistan's worst-ever floods will be discussed, either as part of the summit or a separate meeting on the sidelines.

The vast floods have claimed claimed the lives of more than 1,600 people, and the Secretary-General is pressing nations to offer Pakistan more help to deal with the disaster. 

This 10th anniversary meeting of the MDGs will chart the progress so far and try to determine where attention and resources should be focused between now and 2015, the target year for meeting them.

Funding for the initiative is an abiding problem.

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, 189 world leaders signed the Millennium Declaration, a commitment to meet eight international development goals by 2015. The eight are: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality and empowering women; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing global partnerships to meet the goals.

The Secretary-General has been pushing world leaders to help the poor and vulnerable make ends meet, despite rising budget deficits and severe fiscal problems in some of their countries. "Under any circumstances we must not balance budgets on the backs of the world's poorest people,” the Secretary-General said at a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Canada in June.

He urged G20 governments not to depend on consumption alone to recover from the global downturn, but to invest instead in three areas of high return which he identified as agriculture, green recovery and health systems. “Let us be determined to turn these three areas of high-return investments into a reality,” the Secretary-General said.

The United Nations MDGs web site notes that at the current pace, several of the eight MDGs and associated targets are likely to be missed in many countries.

The findings from the MDGs Hearings of the General Assembly – a part of the official process – convened Jun 14-15 in New York -- will contribute to the debate at the MDGs summit in September. (Written Jul 2010)

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UN MDGs web site
http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/