NEW YORK — Prominent religious, humanitarian and ethical leaders gave mixed grades in late September to progress on meeting the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG), the global yardsticks on fighting poverty.
The ambitious goals, established in 2000 with a target date of 2015, include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health.
World leaders meeting at the United Nations summit Sept. 20–22 acknowledged that several of the global aims — including those around maternal health and child mortality — are not likely to be met by 2015, one reason U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced a $40 billion global health initiative aimed at mothers and children.
“More could have happened, more could be done,” David Beckmann, a Lutheran minister who serves as president of the Washington-based advocacy group Bread for the World, said Sept. 22 at a forum assessing progress on the MDG and the overall global fight against poverty.
Beckmann, a 2010 World Food Prize laureate, called the progress made against poverty “the great exodus of our time” and “an extraordinary liberation,” making him “profoundly hopeful, because hundreds of millions of people have escaped from extreme poverty in the last 20 years.”
“When I look at what’s happened, and I believe in God, this is God moving in our history,” Beckmann said at a forum sponsored by Yale Divinity School at the Church Center for the United Nations. “This is our loving God answering the prayers of hundreds of millions of people.”
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