Financial Crisis Impact On ‘End Poverty’ Work

Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, used his opening statement at the General Assembly to warn us of the danger of relying too much on ‘free markets’. He wanted us to increase our understanding of business ethics and governance with more compassion, and less uncritical faith in the ‘magic’ of the market. The financial crisis has big impact to UN work in ending poverty. It is difficult to do a good job with existing resource allocated for present activities. I am not so sure that the Millennium Development Goal of ending poverty by the year 2015 is achievable at all. Economic crisis has already spreaded to many developing countries, which means that they cannot meet this goal relying on local resources alone. The Brazillian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in addressing the General Assembly earlier this week, said that we must not allow the burden of boundless greed of a few to be shouldered by all. I cannot see a light at the end of the tunnel in getting an increase in development assistance to developing countries. On 25th September, the High-Level Forum of World Leaders are reviewing the progress of work, identify gaps and commit to concrete global efforts for the next seven years. I am certain that they will have to overcome the difficulty of finding donor-governments, at this crisis time, that are willing to give additional resources needed. And without an increase in development assistance, the wide poverty gaps cannot be bridged. For this High-level review, three roundtables discussions are set up at the UN headquarter in New York on: Poverty and Hunger, Education and Health, and Environmental Sustainability, with Gender Equality and Global Partnership for Development addressed as cross-cutting issues. We can only hope that they can come up with creative new ideas on how to stretch existing resources for the work needed to be done in order to reach the UN goal in the year 2015.