New York, 24 September 2013
President Kagame at the UN General Assembly in New York, chaired the 4th meeting of the MDGs Advocacy Group meeting and MDGs Advocate Innovation Forum, gathered to examine the Advocacy Action Plan that will be implemented in the coming year.
With just 828 days to the 2015 deadline, many of the millennium development goals are yet to be fulfilled especially in many developing countries.
President Kagame expressed the need to accelerate the mobilisation and deployment of resources towards meeting the MDGs.
“MDG advocates should not allow progress made against absolute poverty to be lost to information poverty, as pockets of communities are left out because connectivity infrastructure is either absent, limited or too expensive. Over the last decade, we have observed that MDGs have been reached in countries with inclusive and accountable governance. They have however been delayed, where the MDGs were outside a domestic development agenda and not locally owned. And so the relevance and sustainability of development programmes can only be guaranteed by a nationally-driven process.”
Watch the full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2Wjsj3Y6Fc
The MDGs are eight goals launched in September 2000, where some 193 UN member states agreed to achieve by the year 2015 in order to encourage development by improving social and economic conditions in the world’s poorest countries.
According to the national institute of statistics of Rwanda, five of the MDG’s are well on their way to attainment in Rwanda. These include; access to universal primary education, promotion of gender equality and women empowerment, reduction of maternal and child mortality rates and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
The meeting was attended by over twenty advocators who included the head of the UN Foundation, Ted Turner, UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Malaria, Ray Chambers as well as Jeffrey Sachs and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Muhammad Yunus, explored the challenges and the successes of the MDGs.