World leaders on Friday pledged to end extreme poverty within 15 years, adopting an ambitious set of United Nations goals to be backed up by trillions of dollars in development spending.
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The new development goals aim to build on the work of the Millennium Development Goals, which was launched in September 2000 and rallied the world around a common 15-year agenda to tackle the indignity of poverty.
Legendary Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly once famously said: “Football is not a matter of life and death; it’s more important than that”.
“The present time invites us to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society, so as to bear fruit in significant and positive historical events”.
“The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development supplies a convincing concept, potentially promising serenity and wealth to the populace of one’s world by worldwide relationships to be certain that most of the people reside administer the tools of our earth within a ever expanding manner”, said Abdullah Abdullah, the principle govt of Afghanistan. Implicit in the old MDGs was a distinction between wealthy “developed” countries and the less wealthy “developing” nations.
Standing in the assembly chamber’s balcony surrounded by 193 young people representing every country, Malala told the leaders: “The future generation is raising their voice”.
At the UNGA special summit, the Chinese President called for “equitable, open and all-round development” for all.
“Africa has the weakest institutions and infrastructures in order to cope with the impact of climate change”, Sarah Hearn, a senior fellow at NYU’s Center on global Cooperation told RFI.
“An additional eight percent of the developing world’s people received access to water while an additional 15 percent acquired access to improved sanitation services”, he said.
China would act “by putting justice before interests and joining other countries in a concerted effort to realize the post-2015 agenda”, he said. The governments of developed countries can help through capacity-building and aid.
In an in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Saturday, he said that the economists had observed that it could be hard for any country to get resources to finance all the targets of SDGs.
According to the United Nations, officials have forecast 2015 as “a watershed year” for having reached an agreement that will “change the paradigm about development”, while “leaving no one behind”, and giving a boost for a global climate change accord later this year.
Contributions to boost funding for gender equality powerment included $5 million from Chinese e-commerce giant the Alibaba Group and $1 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“Global development should not be the development of any single country”, Xi remarked.
Michael Green, executive director of the Social Progress Imperative which analyzes countries’ progress on social measures, said economic growth alone would not meet the SDGs, which deal with subjects ranging from energy subsidies to developing genebanks.
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Tammam Salam says the Syrian civil war and fleeing refugees “is one of the greatest development challenges” facing Lebanon.
