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UN Chronicle - Volume 45, Issue 1, 2008
Volume 45, Issue 1, 2008
A must-read for every concerned world citizen, the United Nations Chronicle is a quarterly, easy-to-read report on the work of the United Nations and its agencies. Produced by the United Nations Department of Public Information, every issue covers a wide range United Nations related activities: from fighting the drug war to fighting racial discrimination, from relief and development to nuclear disarmament, terrorism, and the world-wide environmental crisis. Written in English and in French, this issue of the Chronicle examines the eighth goal of the UN Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) - to develop a global partnership for development.
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The MDGs and the Least Developed Countries
Author: Cheick Sidi DiarraWhen world leaders vowed at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000 to “spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty”, they recognized that special measures would be required for the weakest members of the international community to achieve this goal.
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Accelerating development in fragile states
Author: Angel GurríaOne sixth of the world’s population lives in fragile States, which are also home to one out of every three people surviving on less than a dollar a day. Of all the children in the world who die before reaching their fifth birthday, half were born in these countries. Of all the women who die in childbirth, one in three dies in these countries. While other developing countries are making progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), these fragile nations, ranging from Haiti to Nepal, from Burundi to Uzbekistan, are falling behind. In 2006, their per capita gross domestic product grew by an average of only 2 per cent, compared with an average 6-per-cent growth in other low-income countries. The gap with other developing countries has been widening since the 1970s.
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The Norway-Tanzania partnership initiative
Author: Jon LomøyOn 29 November 2007, Norway and the United Republic of Tanzania signed a bilateral agreement to support Tanzania’s efforts to reduce child mortality and maternal mortality. The modality for support is to channel funds through a common financing basket for the health sector, together with a number of bilateral and multilateral partners, with no earmarking of the Norwegian funds. This marks the end of a one-year planning process, whereby we have attempted to bridge one of the major divides in the current development practices—namely, between global initiatives mobilizing additional finances for specific themes (in this case, the reduction of child and maternal mortality) and country- led processes of harmonizing and streamlining donor financing— by incorporating assistance into the development budgets, preferably in the form of general, alternatively sectorial, budget support.
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Stepping up efforts to reach the MDGs
Author: Leire Pajín IraolaThere has been too little progress towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). At present, 40 per cent of the world’s population is living below the minimum sanitation threshold, two thirds of all illiterate people are women and over 65 per cent of the people affected by HIV/AIDS live in Africa.
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A global partnership for development
Author: Douglas AlexanderAt the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, the international community declared it would spare no effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which included halving global poverty, getting all the world’s children into school, reducing infant and maternal mortality, and providing clean water and sanitation. Seven years later, we have made some progress: 34 countries are now on track to meet the infant mortality goal, 44 countries are on their way to achieving the poverty goal, and 47 countries are on target with the education goal. Aid increases and debt cancellation have helped to put nearly 40 million more African children into school in the last seven years. Today, more than 1 million people are on antiretroviral treatment in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 100,000 just three years ago.
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Trading an end to poverty
Author: Patricia R. FrancisWe live in an age of wonders. From nano-surgery to space stations, networking sites to solar cells, Internet start-ups to smart capital, the world is a more connected, attractive and safe place than was dreamed possible, even fifty years ago. People live longer, healthier lives, with unprecedented social and political freedoms. Yet, in spite of these achievements, perhaps the greatest wonder is that so much of the world does not share in them. The poorest people still lose one in five children under the age of five, often to preventable diseases, drink unsafe water and have little or no access to basic education or the opportunities to better their lot. Poor women are much more likely to die in childbirth and are even less educated than men.
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Trade and the MDGs
Authors: Santiago Fernández de Córdoba and Antoine BouheyDeveloping countries depend on national and global economic growth to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. In this regard, international trade is recognized as a powerful instrument to stimulate economic progress and alleviate poverty. Trade contributes to eradicating extreme hunger and poverty (MDG 1), by reducing by half the proportion of people suffering from hunger and those living on less than one dollar a day, and to developing a global partnership for development (MDG 8), which includes addressing the least developed countries’ needs, by reducing trade barriers, improving debt relief and increasing official development assistance from developed countries.
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Financing for development to reach the MDGs
Author: Abdlatif Y. Al-HamadAcross the Arab region, progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has been uneven. Arab countries with higher income per capita stand with better prospects for achieving the Goals than their low-income counterparts. Overall, progress has been achieved in youth literacy, gender equality and child mortality. However, poverty is still widespread, especially in the rural areas of Djibouti, Mauritania and Yemen. Hunger is a continuous threat in countries such as Somalia, where malaria and tuberculosis are still prevalent, as well as in Comoros, Djibouti, Mauritania and Sudan.
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Tackling poverty reduction
Author: Amadou Boubacar CissePoverty reduction is the greatest challenge facing humanity today. An ideological commitment to reduce or eradicate this phenomenon should be contemplated as part and parcel of social moral responsibility and shared human values across countries and generations. Failure to do so will have unprecedented repercussions on human development. Although the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been accepted as a basis for action to free men, women and children from the dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, more than 1 billion people are estimated to be in absolute poverty worldwide. Of these, about 40 per cent, or 400 million people, are living in member countries of the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB).
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Scaling up development efforts for Africa
Author: Donald KaberukaThe Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) constitute a shared vision of global partnership based on mutual accountability. Developing countries have the primary responsibility for achieving these Goals. But the international community acknowledges that for poor countries to achieve them, a reinforced partnership is critical, including scaled-up and more effective aid, more sustainable debt relief and fairer trade rules, as well as improved access to affordable drugs, addressing the special needs of landlocked and small island developing nations, and bridging the digital divide.
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The MDGs in the African region
Author: Abdoulie JannehThe midpoint to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—the time-bound and quantified targets, agreed by world leaders at the 2000 Millennium Summit, for improving the human condition and ensuring gender equality and environmental sustainability— was reached in September 2007. Many publications in the run-up to that milestone, including the report of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Assessing Progress in Africa towards the Millennium Development Goals, 2007, show that the continent is most unlikely to reach all the MDGs by the target date. This has generated considerable concern within Africa and among its development partners, and has set in motion a number of actions to accelerate the continent’s growth and development to achieve these Goals.
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The MDGs in Asia and the Pacific
Author: Noeleen HeyzerProgress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the Asian and Pacific region is uneven. We achieved success in some, but faltered in others. Even in areas of success, in-country and intra-country disparities persist. The pace of progress is too slow. Unless we act and accelerate it, 641 million people will continue to live on less than $1 a day; some 97 million children will remain underweight and 4 million will die before reaching the age of five; 400 million people in urban areas will have no access to basic sanitation; and 566 million in rural areas will live without access to clean water.
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The MDGs in the Western Asian region
Author: Bader Al-DafaAs the world marks the midpoint between the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000 and the target date for their achievement in 2015, an assessment of the Arab region’s progress on these is both timely and essential. As a whole, the region has made significant progress in some areas, including education and disease control, yet several factors have constrained the achievement of the MDGs.
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The MDGs in Latin America and the Caribbean
Author: José Luis MachineaThere is no doubt that Latin America is on track to meeting its commitment to halve the 1990 extreme poverty rate by the 2015 target deadline. The most recent estimates by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) show that some 14 million Latin Americans escaped from poverty in 2006 and another 10 million are no longer destitute. The number of poor people stands at 36 per cent of the population (194 million) and those living in indigent conditions at 13.4 per cent (71 million); during 2007, these figures are likely to drop to 190 million and 69 million, respectively. For the first time since 1990, the total number of people living in poverty in the region has dropped below 200 million.
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The MDGs in the European region and beyond
Authors: Marek Belka and Patrice RobineauThe regions covered by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)—the whole European continent, North America and Central Asia— are characterized by a tremendous diversity in levels of economic development. While most countries of Western Europe and North America have levels of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita well above $20,000, for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA) and South Eastern Europe (SEE), the level is below $10,000. Some countries are emerging market economies, thus very close to the corresponding average GDP per capita of Latin American countries and some better-off African countries, such as Egypt (above $4,000). Others have much lower levels of income; for example, Tajikistan has the same level as Rwanda (about $1,200) and in Moldova, the income level is close to that of Ghana ($2,000).
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The Millennium Campaign
Author: Eveline HerfkensIt was the best news for decades, when in 2000 world leaders acknowledged that the most urgent matter at the dawn of the new century was to put an end to poverty, and that the world has the resources and the know-how to do so. With the UN Millennium Declaration, the international community finally achieved the political consensus on what should be done by whom, after years of disagreements between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and Governments, between international financial institutions and the United Nations system, and between the North and the South. Leaders repeatedly declared that they would “spare no effort” to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015.
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Indigenous peoples and the MDGs
Author: United NationsThe Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) summarize the development targets agreed to at international conferences and world summits during the 1990s. At the end of the last century, world leaders distilled the key goals and targets in the Millennium Declaration adopted in September 2000. The Declaration reaffirms the universal values of human rights, equality, mutual respect and shared responsibility for the conditions of all peoples. It also seeks to redress globalization’s hugely unequal benefits and the Governments’ commitments to fulfilling their obligations by 2015.
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Hans Singer: The gentle giant of UN economists
Author: Richard JollyOf the many economists who have worked for the United Nations, Hans W. Singer was the one who did more, and for more different parts of the Organization, than any other.1 During his 22-year career with the United Nations, he worked for the Economic Affairs Department (now DESA), helped lay the foundations for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through his work on the UN Special Fund and the Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA), undertook assignments for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), provided the intellectual rationale for the World Food Programme (WFP) and also spent time with the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the African Development Bank (ADB), the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).
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W. Arthur Lewis: Pioneer of development economics
Author: Kari Polanyi LevittW. Arthur Lewis’ best-known contribution to development economics was his path-breaking work on the transfer of labour from a traditional to a modern capitalist sector in conditions of unlimited supplies of labour. His article, “Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour” (1954), contributed to the establishment of development economics as a specialized field of study. It addressed the mechanisms of transferring surplus labour from traditional activity to a modern capitalist sector under conditions of unlimited supply of labour.
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