World Cities Join Forces to Achieve Millennium Development Goals
By Robert Valencia
More than 1,000 delegates representing cities in 100 countries attended the sixth forum of the World Alliance of Cities Against Poverty (WACAP) in an effort to promote democracy and to achieve international development goals, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said. The event took place in Athens, Greece, from 26 to 28 March.
WACAP’s goal is to boost the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which aims to slash extreme poverty and to reduce the impact of other global problems by 2015. Through WACAP, cities from all continents are contributing to the fulfillment of the objectives and targets of the International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (1997-2006), proclaimed by the General Assembly on December 1995. WACAP was initiated during the first quarter of 1996 and was officially launched on 17 October 1997 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
WACAP unites cities that have decided to take a public stand and mobilise all social sectors to do anything possible to eliminate poverty both home and abroad. According to WACAP, while the world’s wealth has increased seven times in fifty years, the number of people living in poverty has skyrocketed to 1.3 billion, and one person in ten is malnourished or suffers from hunger. WACAP indicates that the average income of the poorest billion people in the world is 78 times smaller than that of the richest billion people today—compared to thirty times thirty-five years ago. Other data indicate that one child dies every three seconds, despite the fact that “our generation is the first in the history of humankind to possess the means and capacity to reverse this situation”.
During the forum, the participating municipalities shared their experiences in the areas of hunger, access to primary education, water and sanitation, child mortality, maternal mortality, HIV/AIDS and gender gaps. According to WACAP, much can be accomplished during the next 10 years “so that no child will go without an education, no human being will be denied primary health care or safe drinking water, and no one will be condemned to go hungry”.
WACAP members discussed a range of other related issues, such as decentralisation, local autonomy, participation, empowerment and participative cooperation to achieve the MDGs, as well as the adoption of time-bound, quantifiable local “road maps” that will establish targets to be reached on several aspects of poverty in each city. According to UNDP, richer cities will commit to cooperation with developing world’s cities to help accomplish the identified goals, according to UNDP.
