World Leaders meet for MDG Summit

Leaders from around the world will meet in New York from Monday to Wednesday for the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Summit. During the three day high level meeting that takes place at the UN Headquarters, they are to review progress, identify gaps and commit to a concrete action agenda to achieve MDGs by the agreed deadline, year 2015.

A decade ago, at the Millennium Summit in September 2000, all member countries of the United Nations joined together in a 15-year effort to combat poverty, hunger and disease.

They agreed that urgent action must be taken to save the lives of the mothers dying needlessly in childbirth, to get the millions of children missing out of education into school, to fight the spread of killer diseases and first and foremost to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger across the world.

With only five years left, until the target date, despite remarkable progress in some countries, many are falling short in their achievement of MDGs.

Progress Reports compiled by the UN point out that the negative impact of these shortfalls were further aggravated by the combined effects of the global food, climate, energy and economic crises that emerged in recent years. As a result, improvements in the lives of the poorest are happening at an unacceptably slow pace and in some countries, hard fought gains are being eroded. At the current pace, several of the eight MDGs and associated targets are likely to be missed in many countries. The challenges are most severe in the least developed countries (LDCs), land-locked developing countries (LLDCs) and some small island developing states (SIDS), UN observed.

In view of this situation, following on a proposal by the UN Secretary General, the General Assembly has decided to convene an MDG Summit on September 20-22, with the aim of speeding progress towards all the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The Summit is expected to undertake a comprehensive review of success, best practices and lessons learned, obstacles and gaps, challenges and opportunities leading to concrete strategies for action. The UN believes that MDGs are achievable provided there is political commitment, collective action and international cooperation to overcome obstacles to their achievement.

Leaders from civil society, foundations and business community around the world will also participate in identifying new initiatives to accelerate progress.