Annan urges cooperation in race for the Millennium Development Goals

(16/11/2006)

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is in Addis Ababa for the fifth African Development Forum where he has warned that, despite some “spectacular progress”, Africa as a whole risks falling behind in the race to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

In his last official visit to the continent before he leaves office, Kofi Annan called on developing countries, international donors and the UN to work together to help African development.

“It is not too late to turn this situation around. But it will take focus, application and commitment,” he told the Forum in Addis Ababa, stressing that progress in opening markets in developed countries to agricultural products from developing nations is “a sine qua non of success.”

The MDGs aim to halve the rate of extreme poverty and hunger, ensure universal primary education, promote gender equality, slash child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters, halt and reverse the incidence of HIV/AIDS and malaria, cut in half the rate of people lacking safe drinking water, and forge a global partnership for development – all by 2015.

Spelling out the roles of the triple partnership, Annan stressed that “what is required most of all if the MDGs are to be achieved” is that developing countries themselves live up to their commitments by adopting comprehensive national strategies and implementing them in a transparent way that benefits all their citizens.

“The world has a moral and strategic obligation to address shared concerns of poverty and disease and despair on this continent,” he added. “In essence, this vision of development is a compact: if developing countries deliver on comprehensive, fleshed-out national strategies, then donors are committed to meeting the needs that cannot be met through domestic resources alone.”

“The UN must be there to support their vision and their plans, and to help them build the capacity – the skills, the institutions, the systems – to deliver the jobs, houses, schools and healthcare that their people need,” Annan said.

ENDS