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Today's MDG Summit

Sep 20, 2010, 12:19 PM

With only five years left towards the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). World leaders have begun arriving in New York to attend a 2010 MDG Review Summit officially called the High-Level Plenary Meeting of the General Assembly.

The high-level forum to be held from 20 to 22 September is meant to accelerate progress towards the attainment of 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 global efforts to meet the Goals."

It worth recalling that the targets adopted at the UN Millennium Summit of 2000 are aimed at slashing poverty, hunger, disease, maternal and child deaths and other ills by a 2015 deadline. The summit is an opportunity to re-energise the global commitment to achieve the eight time-bound goals and agree on a concrete action plan towards meeting the Goals by their target date of 2015.

The much talked about MDGs are established to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, improve child and maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development.

We firmly believe that the MDGs are attainable since there are good plans to address the challenges systematically but what is in fact needed is the will to put them into action.

However, it is also evident that while major successes have been achieved in many countries, without additional efforts, several goals are likely to be missed in many countries.

We challenge the world leaders meeting in New York to commit more resources and will towards the attainment of the MDGs.