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UN Millennium Project's "Investing in Development" was presented to Secretary-General Annan on 17 January, and welcomed by experts as cost-effective blueprint for achieving Millennium Development Goals by 2015. In the
most comprehensive strategy ever put forward for combating global poverty, hunger
and disease, a blue-ribbon team of 265 of the world's leading development experts
today proposed a package of scores of specific cost-effective measures that together
could cut extreme poverty in half and radically improve the lives of at least
one billion people in poor developing countries by 2015. The recommendations of
the UN Millennium Project, an independent advisory body to the UN Secretary-General,
are laid out in the report Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve
the Millennium Development Goals. The report was presented to United Nations Secretary-General
Kofi Annan today. Secretary-General Annan has said the fight against extreme poverty
should be the top priority of the world community and the UN system in 2005.
"Until
now, we did not have a concrete plan for achieving the Millennium Development
Goals," said Prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist who directed the three-year
UN Millennium Project. "The experts who contributed to this huge undertaking
have shown without a doubt that we can still meet the Goals-if we start putting
this plan into action right now."
The UN Millennium Project's report
was released as the Asian tsunami disaster focused global attention on the need,
scale and effectiveness of aid to the world's poor. The enormously generous response
to the tragedy sent a powerful message that ordinary citizens in wealthier nations
do in fact support such aid-if they clearly see the need and if they believe the
funds they provide will reach and help the people in need. The Project's plan
addresses these legitimate concerns-and shows that targeted investments in essential
public services such as health, education and infrastructure make poor communities
less vulnerable to such disasters and to the hardships of disease, hunger and
environmental degradation. The Project report leads off a yearlong series
of global initiatives aimed at making the Goals a reality, including a report
to UN member states from the Secretary-General in March, which will draw heavily
on the Project's recommendations. With world leaders gathering at the G8 meeting
in July and again at the UN in September to accelerate progress towards the Goals,
2005 has become the key year for mobilizing international support for the fight
against poverty and disease, UN officials stressed.
"The Project team
has given us the biggest intellectual contribution to the development debate from
the UN system in at least 20 years," said Mark Malloch Brown, the Secretary-General's
incoming chief of staff and chairman of the United Nations Development Group,
(UNDG).
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