Caritas raises voices against poverty at UN Development summit

World leaders will attend a summit at the UN in New York on 20-22 September to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a series of targets that range from cutting child and maternal mortality to halving the number of people who go hungry.
Caritas Senegal Secretary General Abbé Ambroise Tine will be at the talks as the representative of Caritas Internationalis, the confederation of 165 national Catholic charities. He will be speaking at the UN on 22 September about how justice and not charity is key if the MDGs are to be meet.
Abbé Tine said, “If you ask a poor family in Senegal if they have heard of the Millennium Development Goals, they will almost certainly answer no. But they are working every day as hard as anyone to achieve them. They just know the MDGs by a different name. They call them survival”.
Progress has been made over the last decade since world leaders signed up to the Millennium Declaration in 2000. When school fees were abolished in Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya, seven million additional children started going to school. There has been a ten-fold increase in anti-retroviral treatment for HIV and AIDS in the last five years.
But with five years to go until the 2015 deadline, many poor countries will not come close to meeting the targets. Patrick Nicholson, spokesman for Caritas Internationalis points out that one in seven children in Africa don’t live to see their fifth birthday: “Globally, 8.8 million children died in 2008. Four diseases pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria and AIDS accounted for 43 percent of those deaths. Low cost solutions to cut deaths exist for them all”. Hear more: