We the Peoples

"We the Peoples is another great document by another great individual, Kofi Annan. It is the document that the former Secretary-General put before the world’s leaders at the start of the millennium. It is a powerful statement not only about the kind of world that we want to live in but that we can build. So it is a far-reaching document about economic development, human rights, political freedom, mutual respect and environmental sustainability. Of course, I am especially attracted to this powerful document because it is the place where the world leaders adopted the Millennium Development Goals. It’s in that context that Kofi Annan challenged the world leaders to adopt specific time-bound development goals. And they were adopted in the Millennium Summit in 2000 and that started this 15-year process of which we are now in the tenth year. Of course, one can’t be satisfied that we have done what we set out to do because the world proved so easily and tragically distracted by war and by short-term crises that it dropped the ball and the longer-term development possibilities. So the world lost a lot of time on the Millennium Development Goals during the last ten years, but there has also been tremendous progress in many, many areas in things like malaria control and the reduction of measles. There has been better coverage for immunisation and more children in school and improvements in agriculture in many places. Often what we are seeing is a breakthrough that shows how the goals can be achieved, but the breakthrough isn’t reaching the number of people that need to be reached. So when we come to this summit in New York, the good examples are very, very powerful and they span all eight of the Millennium Development Goals. They show what works, how fast progress is made, the breakthrough that we can have, but at the same time we know that certain of these achievements still only cover a small portion of the people in need and that is why the progress has been much less that it needs to be. The reason for bringing world leaders together, of course, is both to help show them what should and can be done and secondly to get a renewed dedication to follow it through, and that is what we are hoping to accomplish now."