We must tackle the greatest injustice of this century — says Gordon Brown / British PM
WE MUST TACKLE THE GREATEST INJUSTICE OF THIS CENTURY
Public Service Review: International Development Issue 11 - Friday, August 22, 2008
2008 must be the year that the world remembers its vow to eradicate poverty, and strives to keep it, says Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
In 2000, world leaders came together in an unprecedented show of unity and moral purpose and agreed eight Millennium Development Goals – creating for the first time a clear plan of action to tackle the most serious injustices facing the developing world.
The Goals are to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV and AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability and finally to develop a global partnership for development.
But eight years on, it is to our great shame that the world is unlikely to achieve a single one of the goals we set ourselves to achieve by 2015.
Progress has been too slow and too uneven and lives are being unnecessarily lost as a result of our collective failure to act quickly enough.
Take the promise that every primary school age child would be in school by 2015, which is crucial to breaking the cycle of deprivation for so many families living in poverty. On present rates of progress we will not meet that goal in 2015. Not even by 2100. It will be 2115 before the Goal is reached.
100 years is too long to wait.
The UK is playing its part in efforts to achieve the goals – I recently announced funding for 20 million anti-malaria bed nets, which will help save millions of lives.
And good progress was made at the recent G8 leaders’ summit in Japan: 100 million malaria bed nets and money that will immediately provide for 10 million extra children being able to go to school.
But there is so much more work to do.
I want 2008 to be the year that the world remembers its promises – and remembers it must keep them.
To do this, we must form a coalition the likes of which the world has never seen before.
Everyone has a role to play in this coalition – from faith leaders, business leaders and world leaders through to individuals who agree with us that the suffering endured by the world’s poorest people must end – and be ended by us.
We have the power to raise the standard of living of millions of people living without hope and without the means to better their lives and the lives of their children.
This power is all the more potent in a world where rising food prices are – almost unthinkably after the horrors we witnessed in the 1980s – putting people on the brink of famine, which is once again threatening the lives of millions around the world.
As Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once said: “We cannot feast while others starve, we cannot be happy while others are sad, we cannot be fully at ease while millions suffer.” As long as millions of people are in poverty, our whole society is impoverished.
Our mission is clearer and more urgent than ever before: poverty can be eradicated, poverty must be eradicated and, if we work together for change, poverty will be eradicated.
In September we will mark the halfway point to 2015 by gathering at the UN headquarters in New York to take stock of progress so far and make plans to accelerate it, and tackle what has become a poverty emergency.
We used to be able to say ‘if only’ – if only we had the technology, the medicines, the science and the engineering skills, we could meet the Millennium Development Goals.
But with the technology, the medicines, the science and the engineering skills we do now have today, it is only the will to act that must be found.
We must get 40 million more children in schools by 2010, just two years away, with the final goal of every child getting good quality schooling by 2015.
We must invest in training four million nurses, doctors, midwives and health workers, and provide the equipment so we can eradicate polio, tuberculosis, malaria and diphtheria, and then go on to eradicate HIV Aids in our generation.
And we must set aside $20bn for food aid and give people the means, free of the old agricultural protectionism, to grow food themselves and start a green revolution in Africa.
And if people say that these are unrealisable, idealistic goals, we must reply that 20 years ago it seemed an impossible dream that apartheid would end, but thanks to the will of the people, it did.
We must now do the same to make poverty in the developing world – the greatest injustice of this generation – history.
