Mon, 09/20/2010

From the UN: With only five years left until the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on world leaders to attend a summit in New York on 20-22 September to accelerate progress towards the MDGs.

Coming amid mixed progress and new crises that threaten the global effort to halve extreme poverty, “the summit will be a crucially important opportunity to redouble our efforts to meet the Goals,” he said, referring to the targets adopted at the UN Millennium Summit of 2000, aimed at slashing poverty, hunger, disease, maternal and child deaths and other ills by a 2015 deadline.

“Our world possesses the knowledge and the resources to achieve the MDGs” the Secretary-General stated in his report in preparation for the September summit. “Our challenge today is to agree on an action agenda to achieve the MDGs.”