UNDP Chief heading for Africa

To promote development goals :

UN: The Head of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on Saturday began a four-country visit to Africa to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the eight anti-poverty targets agreed upon by world leaders with a 2015 deadline.

“Achieving the MDGs,” said UNDP Administrator Helen Clark, “means quite simply a better life for billions of people.”

The trip will take her to Mali, Burkina Faso, Tanzania and South Africa, where she hopes to spread the message that it is possible to meet the Goals through proven policies backed by strong partnerships, UN officials said.

Miss Clark’s visit to sub-Saharan Africa comes some 150 days before world leaders converge at the UN headquarters in New York, just prior to the start of the General Assembly’s annual General Debate, to identify obstacles to achieving the MDGs.

In Mali, she will tour the historic city of Timbuktu and meet with female mango farmers, while in Burkina Faso, she will stop at a facility which boosts rural women’s access to energy and a center focusing on reintegrating sex workers.

While in Tanzania, she will visit a protected forest and speak with newly-registered voters, and in South Africa, she will take part in a pre-World Cup soccer match in Pretoria.

Sub-Saharan Africa, still the region with the highest number of people living in extreme poverty, has seen its poverty rates plummet since 1990, falling to below 50 percent in 2008.

But UNDP warned that the global recession has slowed that progress in the past year.

The region has also reduced the number of adults and children newly infected with HIV/AIDS by almost 20 percent between 2001 and 2008, with access to antiretroviral treatments also expanding in many countries.

United Nations, Sunday, Xinhua