The call for renewed action is being made as government across the globe have lagged behind in fulfilling their promises to reduce poverty and improve health and education opportunities for people even as only five years remain until the 2015 deadline to achieve the goals. [break]
“We must not fail the billions who look to the international community to fulfill the promise of the Millennium Declaration for a better world,” Ban was quoted as saying in his report, Keeping the Promise, issued Wednesday.
The report -- which will serve as a basis for government deliberations on an action-oriented outcome document for the Summit on the MDGs -- identifies success factors and lessons learnt, and highlights gaps, emerging challenges and opportunities. It also lays out specific recommendations for action to boost progress towards the Goals over the remaining five years.
“Our world possesses the knowledge and the resources to achieve the MDGs,” Ban said in the report, referring to the targets based on the 2000 Millennium Declaration, aimed at greatly reducing poverty, hunger, disease, maternal and child deaths and other ills by 2015.
Falling short of the Goals would be an unacceptable failure - moral and practical, the Secretary-General said, cautioning global leaders that if they failed, the dangers in the world - instability, violence, epidemic diseases, environmental degradation and runaway population growth - would only multiply.
The MDGs promise to halve extreme poverty and hunger, improve school enrollment and child health, expand access to clean water, strengthen control of malaria, tuberculosis and neglected tropical diseases, and provide increased access to HIV treatment, among other things.
Even though a number of countries have achieved major successes, demonstrating that the MDGs are indeed achievable with the right policies, adequate investment and international support, the progress has remained fairly uneven.
For instance, Nepal managed to reduce under-five child mortality rate by more than 50 percent since 1990, but it is still far from convincingly stating that it will meet the target of reducing such deaths by two-thirds. Similar is the situation on maternal mortality rate, among others.
The report points out that the developed countries also have largely lagged behind in pledging adequate support to needy countries like Nepal for achieving the MDGs.
Given such a situation, the report cautions that without additional efforts, many countries are likely to miss several goals. And the challenges are most severe in the least developed countries, land-locked developing countries, some small island developing states, those vulnerable to natural hazards, and countries in or emerging from conflict.
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