What must we do?

Social Policy Section
Social Development Division, United Nations ESCAP

What must we do?

BACKGROUNDER 1 - THE CONFERENCE

People are clearly the region’s most abundant and most valuable resource. Development must put human good as its priority, — in other words, it must focus on people. Such development, however, is a multi-dimensional process encompassing not only policies to end poverty, unemployment and discrimination but measures to improve food and nutrition, health care, education, safe drinking water and sanitation, shelter, security, distributive justice and the people’s ability and freedom to participate in society.

Facing the challenge of matching human development with economic growth is the reason why ministers and officials from the 60 member and associate member countries and areas of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) are meeting in Manila. They have come to take stock of their progress and to see if economic prosperity has also brought about social good.

Specifically, they will look back to goals they set forth three years before, at a regional meeting held in 1994, before the landmark 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, Denmark. At that pre-Summit meeting, ESCAP members and associate members came up with a detailed plan - which they called the Agenda for Action on Social Development in the ESCAP Region - that they presented to the Summit.

Enshrined in that Regional Social Development Agenda were a series of specific goals, in the areas of population, health, education, employment, shelter, environment, disasters, crime, social protection and the family, that governments pledged to attain in order to advance the cause of social development. One of these is the eradication of absolute poverty in the region by 2010. The agenda emphasized the roles of governments, non-governmental groups, employers and workers, local communities, transnational bodies; and, above all, the people themselves in achieving social progress.

The meeting in Manila will be the first of a series of biennial conferences that will be convened to see how far ESCAP members and associate members have gone in developing equitable societies. Economic development, while a necessary prerequisite for social advancement, nonetheless needs to be utilized properly in order to get better lives. This meeting is part of the process of discovering how best to meet that challenge.

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