Our aspirations must become achievements

In March 2000, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan published his report, ‘We the Peoples’: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, listing the major challenges in the world. The report presented an action plan that included halving the relative amount of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, guaranteeing basic education to all children and reducing HIV-infection rates by 25 per cent by 2010. The key message of the Secretary-General’s Millennium Report was that the welfare of the world’s people is our shared responsibility. In an interdependent world, no nation is an island and people’s fortunes are interlinked. The current situation, in which the majority of the global population lives in poverty while the minority lives in abundance, is not only wrong; in the long run, it is unsustainable.