Maleeha for stepping up efforts towards implementing new global development goals

Pakistan's Ambassador to the UN, Maleeha Lodhi, speaking in her capacity as Unicef Executive Board's President, Tuesday gave a clarion call for all concerned to prepare for the implementation of the international community's new sustainable development goals aimed at eradicating poverty, fighting inequality, combating climate change and dealing with children's problems.
"It is up to all of us - Governments, Executive Board members, United Nations organizations, civil society, the private sector, local communities and children themselves - to make sure this agenda is implemented fully and on schedule," she told the 36-member UNICEF board while opening its second session of the current year.
"This will be a challenging task," the Pakistani envoy said, adding, "This is our chance to make history." The post-2015 agenda, she said, proved to the world once again that "we in the United Nations do more than talk." The draft document constituting the new sustainable development agenda, which was adopted in August, will be formally adopted by world leaders, including Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, at UN Headquarters in New York later this month.
In the course of her statement, Dr Lodhi also called for urgent action to resolve the deadly migrant crisis, drawing attention to the fact that half of refugees today are children. In this regard, she urged the international community to live up to its responsibility to address desperate situations in which children were the principal and tragic victims.
Describing the global refugee crisis as the "most horrific", she said it was a humanitarian catastrophe in which the suffering of children was unprecedented. She recalled that just last week the harrowing and heart breaking image of a three year old toddler lying dead on a beach after his parents' desperate flight from conflict had reverberated across the world. This, she said, should shake the international community's collective conscience and prompt urgent action.
It was pointed out that "Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" encompasses a universal, transformative and integrated agenda that heralds an historic turning point for the world. Concluding a negotiating process that has spanned more than two years with the unprecedented participation of civil society, the 193 Member States agreed to an ambitious agenda that features 17 new sustainable development goals that aim, by 2030, to eradicate extreme poverty, promote prosperity and people's well-being, while protecting the environment. "We must thank all of you who have spent months, if not years, negotiating this agenda and related outcome documents," Dr Lodhi, the president of the Executive Board, said. "As a result of your efforts, children's issues are boldly and directly addressed as never before."
The post-2015 agenda, set forth in the outcome document, "Transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development", builds on the preparation for, and successful outcome of, the 2015 Third International Conference on Financing for Development, in Addis Ababa. The outcome document of that conference broke new ground in stating, in no uncertain terms, that investment in children was necessary for development.
Ambassador Lodhi pointed out that the post-2015 agenda will be launched in a very different setting. "One of greater inequality, of more damaging environmental degradation linked to natural disasters and other crises, and of more widespread and brutal conflict, to name a few examples. At the same time, the post-2105 agenda's goals and targets are even more ambitious and wide-ranging than those of the MDGs, and encompass countries and communities of all income levels"
It's implementation would require changing old ways of doing business and embracing innovation, including reaching every child, especially the most disadvantaged and vulnerable. It would also require strengthening the capacity of the least developed countries, and other low-income countries, to gather and analyze data and track progress, so that they have a better chance of reaching the goals and targets, as also new ways in middle-and upper-income countries to reach children who are overlooked in data that are based on national averages.