"We will have time to reach the Millennium Development Goals - worldwide and in most, or even all, individual countries - but only if we break with business as usual. We cannot win overnight. Success will require sustained action across the entire decade between now and the deadline. It takes time to train the teachers, nurses and engineers; to build the roads, schools and hospitals; to grow the small and large businesses able to create jobs and income needed. So we must start now. And we must more than double global development assistance over the next years. Nothing less will help to achieve the Goals."
OBJECTIVE: To examine past and continuing efforts of the UNDP's Millennium Development Goal of Eradicating Extreme Poverty and Hunger in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The UN Millennium Project brings together 10 task forces, the Secretariat, and broad array of participants from academia, government, UN agencies, international financial institutions, nongovernmental organizations. This is truly a global effort to cut world poverty by half. If these goals are achieved by 2015, more than 500 million people will be lifted out of extreme poverty. More than 300 million people will no longer suffer from hunger. 30 million children will be saved.
Between 1990 and 2001, according to World Bank estimates, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty fell from 28 percent to 21 percent in the developing world. The number of people in extreme poverty dropped from 1.21 billion to 1.09 billion. Many regions, especially large parts of East Asia and South Asia, experienced dramatic economic and social progress. Yet Sub-Saharan Africa, most dramatically, has been in a downward spiral of AIDS, resurgent malaria, falling food output per person, deteriorating shelter conditions, and environmental degradation, so that most countries in the region are on a trajectory to miss most or all of the Goals.
Today, we will examine the UN efforts in eradicating poverty in both Ethiopia and Eritrea. Both countries had and are currently engaged in hostility against each other. The Ethiopian-Eritrea War from 1998 to 2000 hurt the economy of both countries and prevented GDP growth. The conflicts incurred enormous loss in property and destroyed civil infrastructures in both countries. To see more of our presentation, please click here.