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Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for being together.
Oh. Okay, good. Say, we’re gonna talk a bit about the millennium development goals.
These are the world’s agreed targets for tackling extreme poverty by 2015.
They were set in 2000.
The largest ever gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, came together,
and set a really practical timeline for tackling the goals
in time for a benchmark year of 2015.
There are eight goals.
They tackle the critical issues of extreme poverty
ranging from income poverty to hunger to child mortality,
education, gender and equality,
and they’re really a comprehensive set of basic objectives
for tackling the means to a productive life.
Now, if we think about how the world’s done since 2000
and since the benchmark year for tackling poverty since 1990
you see there’s two basic stories.
One is that on the top part the world’s making good progress overall.
This is people living on less than a dollar a day.
But you also see that there are many parts of the world, African age in particular
that aren’t having as much progress.
Now, underneath it all, what do you do? How do you tackle these goals?
The basic point is that there are practical solutions.
Tackling Malaria is about mosquito nets, it’s about medicine.
Growing more food, it’s about fertilizer, it’s about seeds.
Cell phones are huge innovation that have come into the world in the past ten years
have changed what we can do They’ve changed how we can connect.
They’ve changed how we can mobilize as populations
to make our world function as a world.
Now, we’ve come together on many occasions
to discuss what the millennium development goals can do.
In 2005 the leaders of the G8 countries came together
and made extremely important promises for the developing world overall
and Africa in particular
and made basically promise to double their support to the developing world by 2010.
This own forum here at the World Economic Forum
had a major call to action in 2008.
It had leaders from business, from government, from civil society,
from all regions of the world say we need to actually come together
not just as governments but as a global coalition to take on very practical actions.
Since then the world had some problems, we all know.
This is a picture from Haiti, well, before the recent tragedies
when the food price crisis was wreaking havoc on the economy and the society.
We’ve had major declines, major stresses in the global economy,
but we’ve also had major progress. This is a graph of child mortality since 1990.
This past year there are less than... for the first time,
less than nine million children who died.
Still an extraordinary number but the progress around the world
has been one of tremendous gains and in some countries extraordinary gains.
We’ve had other areas of progress like AIDS treatment.
There’s been a takeoff from a decade ago.
No one in Subsaharan-Africa getting any support from anywhere in the world
to take AIDS treatment to now more than three million people on AIDS treatment
in one continent alone. This is a dramatic breakthrough.
Last September President Obama gave a speech at the United Nations
where he called for an action plan to be presented and agreed upon
at the 2010 September MBG Summit at the United Nations, only nine months away.
He called for that action plan because we need to figure out how to get the job done.
Well, in the Young Global Leaders Network
we said we don’t just need a government action plan,
we need a people’s action plan,
distance to go well beyond the government’s at this stage.
This is an all hands on deck effort. This is gonna require the best of us,
whatever our skills, whatever our expertise,
and we’ve launched this effort to say these are goals for all of us to achieve
and for all of us to contribute to.
This week we’ve launched more than 60 pledges from throughout the community
focusing on everything from outreach and advocacy,
from leveraging those new technologies,
Facebook, Do Something, Sungard, the GAVI alliance,
but also to implement, to get the job done,
whether it’s building a school in Afghanistan,
whether it’s expanding microfinance
to hundreds of thousands and even millions of people
whether it’s deworming the world.
Ten million children will be dewormed this year alone
based on a partnership of our group.
Now, we think that there’s a lot more action to be done.
And we want to open this process up. This is to be truly a people’s action plan.
The September summit will take place this year
where the governments will come together,
but we hope that using the new technologies, the new opportunities to connect
that our people can come together to help achieve these goals.
Thank you.