Rich countries should be just as active earmarking funds to meet the United Nations' poverty-fighting goals as they did to fight the financial crisis, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Saturday at a conference in Austria.
Ban's comments came just over two weeks before world leaders meet from September 20 in New York to follow up on the Millenium Goals adopted in 2000, which aimed at halving poverty in the following 15 years. Because of austerity measures, developed countries are lagging behind in meeting their aid promises, Ban said at the annual European Forum Alpbach conference in the Tyrol province, the Austrian press agency APA reported.
"If industrial states can mobilise 20 billion dollars in a short time to fight the financial crisis, there is no excuse why the considerably lower funds to reach the millennium goals can't be raised," he said. The global recession means that 64 million less people will exit poverty in 2010 than would have otherwise, a World Bank report said earlier this year. Yet the developing world is still expected to meet the 2015 goal of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty.
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