PRESS CONFERENCE ON MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS

PRESS CONFERENCE ON MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS

In opening remarks concerning his first annual report on how nations have followed up the Millennium Declaration, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the report "says the world is falling short.  If we carry on the way we are, most of the pledges are not going to be fulfilled". 

Also present at today's press conference were Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Jeffrey Sachs, the Special Advisor to the Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals, and Eveline Herfkens, former Netherlands Minister for Development Cooperation and the Executive Coordinator for the Millennium Development Goals Campaign. 

[The Millennium Campaign was initiated by the Secretary-General to make the commitments contained in the Millennium Declaration better known throughout the world and to ensure that they were the focus of global action.]

The United Nations had to keep thinking about the well over a billion people who struggled to survive on a dollar a day or less, without clean water or sanitation, and who went to bed hungry every night, Mr. Annan said.  The eight Millennium Development Goals included halving extreme poverty, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS, and giving full primary education to all children, girls and boys alike.  All States had agreed that the Goals must be achieved by 2015.

Concerning the Millennium Development Goals, the record was mixed, at best, he said.  There were marked differences between regions.  Over the past decade, East Asia had already halved the proportion of people living on less than one dollar per day -- from 28 per cent to 14.  South Asia, where nearly half the world's poor still lived, had seen a more modest drop:  from 44 per cent to 37.

But in Africa, where ten years ago 48 per cent of people were living on one dollar a day or less, the figure today was 47 per cent, he continued.  In ten years, Africa had only managed to cut the proportion by one forty-eighth.  The first big test of the commitment to achieve the Goals would come in 2005, by which time Member States had pledged to achieve parity of girls and boys in both primary and secondary schools.  It was unlikely to be met, as between 1990 and 2000 the gender gap had narrowed by only 25 per cent.  "Without greater success in placing more girls in school, I fear it will prove even more difficult to reach the other goals", he said.

Each country must find the right mix of policies that suited its local conditions, and the people of each country must insist that those policies were applied, he said.  All the United Nations could do was keep reminding governments of their pledges, and urge them to do whatever was needed to meet those pledges and make them come true.

He said the United Nations would help every developing country to produce its own annual report -- "so that in each country the people will know how they

are doing.  Our hope is that, in this age of democracy, once people know they will be able to insist on action".

Highlighting the importance of national reporting in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), said that when people could see how their country was doing compared to people next door, that data would drive political change.

That sort of national “report card”, noted Mr. Malloch Brown, would lead to policy changes as well as to people demanding of their governments more access to education, better health care and the answer as to why the country next door was doing better than their own governments in providing basic services.  The process must be owned and led by the countries themselves, he emphasized.

Work at the country level, global reporting and the work done by Jeffrey Sachs were all elements, together with the operational work of the entire United Nations system, that needed aggressive promotion, he said.  The United Nations could not do it by itself.  Countries, governments and civil society must demand that the Millennium Goals were met and that the necessary resources were provided to do so. 

He said that Eveline Herfkens would be working with him to ensure that some of the approaches used in successful campaigns, such as the landmines campaign, were modeled to build coalitions of the “like-minded”, which would take whatever action was required to force the Goals to the top of the agenda everywhere and to create a global movement behind them.

Ms. Herfkens said that the best news in decades for the poor had been the international consensus on the Millennium Development Goals and the fact that different actors were rallying around those goals.  The best news for the poor in centuries would be if those goals were actually implemented. 

Asked what additional elements along with the campaign were needed to speed up implementation of the Millennium Development Goals, Mr. Malloch Brown said that real time data was necessary to benchmark country progress on the achievement of the goals.  Also, by making achievement of the Goals a transparent and open process, the United Nations hoped to involve people everywhere in the process.

Ms. Herfkens stressed that it was not those sitting in New York who achieved the goals but people in the countries themselves, both in developing and developed countries.  The efforts of the developed countries to reach the Millennium Development Goals were important in areas such as aid, trade and being coherent in their policies to create an environment in which developing countries could achieve those goals.

She hoped to assist in creating the types of alliances, both global and local, needed to achieve that, she added.  There were already many international networks that could be brought together, such as those of parliamentarians and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Mr. Malloch Brown said the goals would not be achieved without reaching something near the $50 billion a year that was recommended, every year.  That amount, he noted, was still short of the 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product for official development assistance to which the Europeans had recommitted themselves.  More development assistance on a very sizeable scale was critical. 

However, money alone was not enough.  The changes came in developing country outcomes by additionally focusing on priorities for spending and developing local capacity, among other things.  "At the same time, without resources, we’ll never get there", he added.

First, he said, it was necessary to align all of the existing resources behind the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals.  Then it was necessary to campaign for more resources.  Finally, the real bulk of money for development came from within developing countries themselves.  He hoped to see, through the campaign, a fundamental shift in the domestic allocation of resources towards achieving the goals.  The price for governments that did not do that would be a surprise at the ballot box.

Jeffrey Sachs noted that a World Health Organization (WHO) commission on macroeconomics and health had examined what was now available and what would be needed to achieve the health-related goals.  The work done had estimated that there was roughly $3 billion a year for health for the low-income countries right now in development assistance.  What was needed was around $25 billion to meet the goals.  It was extremely important to put that number into context.

The rich world, he continued, had an annual income of $25 trillion.  So $25 billion in development assistance meant 10 cents from the rich countries for every $100 of gross national product.  What that would accomplish, according to the commission, was averting eight million deaths every year and addressing the AIDS pandemic, the Malaria and Tuberculosis resurgence, the millions of children still dying of preventable diseases and the half a million mothers dying in childbirth now. 

There wasn’t a better bargain in the world than that, he said.  As the facts, and what was expected from the rich world, became better understood, he was confident that the resources could be mobilized.

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