Education improves health, while health improves learning potential. Education and health complement, enhance and support each other; together, they serve as the foundation for a better world. To be able to read, write and calculate has been acknowledged as a human right.

Despite the concerted efforts of many players, global progress in child survival has slowed compared to the advances of previous decades. Maternal mortality -- deaths of women in pregnancy and childbirth -- remains at almost the same level as 20 years ago.

In 2000, the international community endorsed the Millennium Declaration, which sets out an historic commitment to eradicate extreme poverty and improve the health of the world's poorest people by 2015.

The first disease to be the subject of debates in the United Nations, both in the Security Council and the General Assembly special sessions, AIDS is one of the top ten leading causes of death worldwide.

A question that is sometimes posed is whether women in Muslim contexts are entitled to equal rights. Are their culture and religion opposed to women having equal rights? To answer this, let us recognize the fact that nearly all the countries with Muslim majorities are signatories to international agreements advancing women's rights.

The 2000 UN Millennium Declaration, from which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) emerged, focuses on development and poverty eradication, through peace and security, human rights, democracy and good governance. It identifies the fundamental values of freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature and shared responsibility.

One of nine children growing up from a small town in an African country, Meaza was told: Oh, you're so smart and have so much potential, it's too bad you're not a boy. But her mother, who was illiterate, believed her children deserved better. When I think of my mother, I think about how women are prevented from reaching their potential, she says.

In their solemn Millennium Declaration of 2000, world leaders committed themselves to spare no effort to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the world's people who suffer from poverty and hunger. Just seven years remain for us to meet that momentous challenge.

From its inception in 1945, the United Nations has led an unrelenting fight against racism and racial discrimination. The framework for the Organization's work in that area was the declaration in the preamble to its Charter on the question of human rights: We the peoples of the United Nations determined . to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and . to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours.

Resistance to discrimination goes back to the origin of the human rights concept. It was the rejection of differentiation of people on the basis of national, ethnic or social origin, religion and gender, as well as resistance against slavery, that marked the history of human rights.