At the 65th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York yesterday, President of the Assembly Joseph Deiss said that developed countries have a moral duty to care about the well-being of its weakest members.
Delivering his address to the Assembly, Deiss urged countries, donors, civil society and the private sector to cooperate more closely to defeat poverty, hunger and disease, and called on the Heads of State gathered in New York to send a strong message “about our will to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)” by their target date of 2015.
Among the Heads of State will be President Bharrat Jagdeo, who – without a doubt – is well respected in the arena of the United Nations, having been named as one of the persons to achieve the Champion of the Earth Award, by a UN agency, the United Nations Environmental Programme in April.
The President has always made the case for developed countries to do their part to lift poorer nations out of poverty and has demonstrated a willingness to work with the international community to meet some of these achievements.
Indeed, Guyana has benefitted from many bilateral and multilateral agreements that saw the country receiving resources for meeting many of the MDGs, whether in education, health, water or poverty reduction.
Further, every year, the country has been seeing a marked increase in the budgetary allocations in the various social sectors, all with the aim of improving Guyana’s ranking on these.

Even though we make the allocations bigger from the budget, the country needs the aid of the international community to fully realize the targets by the set date. This is no insignificant task and there will be incidents, however remote, to remind us that even though we may have come far, we can still go further.
This has always been an acknowledgement of the Government. The message is that although there is tremendous progress being made in all facets of an ever-improving Guyanese life-style and standard-of-living, it is not prudent to rest on laurels but to keep shoulder to the wheel to continue to propel the country towards greater prosperity.
According to Deiss yesterday, data indicates that “real progress” was made on some of the MDGs since they were formulated at a UN Summit in the year 2000, and that poverty has declined substantially in overall terms in the past two decades.
“But we are lagging behind in some regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa. And we are also falling short in some areas, especially with regard to eradicating hunger, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health. Additional efforts are needed,” said Deiss in his address.
If the gathering of world leaders is meant to be a source of comfort that things will get done, just remember Copenhagen last December. If this latest UN gathering is to mean anything to the people in the world, especially those from developing countries like ours, then the Summit must end with a firm commitment and concrete steps toward increasing aid to poorer countries. The expectation of, and lobbying efforts by, our President would be nothing less than this.