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Sheikh Hasina speaks at UNICEF MDG event in New York

© UNICEF/NYHQ2010-1966/Markisz

On 22 September, Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina speaks at the panel discussion ‘Children and the MDGs: Reaching the Most Vulnerable’, at UNICEF House. Beside her on the dais are (left-right) President of Slovenia Danilo Türk, Chief Minister of the Human Rights Secretariat of the Presidency of Brazil Paulo Vannuchi, President of the Rockefeller Foundation Judith Rodin, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow and UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.

New York, 23 September 2010: At UNICEF’s closing event for the UN Millennium Development Goals summit, experts and world leaders gathered to highlight the importance of reaching the world’s most disadvantaged and hard-to-reach children in order to achieve the MDGs with equity by 2015.

Held at UNICEF headquarters in New York, a high-level panel entitled, ‘Children and the MDGs: Reaching the Most Vulnerable’ focused on recent data revealing inequities that still exist for children in the developing world.

The panellists included the President of Slovenia, Danilo Türk, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, Minister Paulo Vannuchi of Brazil's Human Rights Secretariat, Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin and UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.

UNICEF’s latest ‘Progress for Children’ report argues that focusing on the poorest and most marginalized children and families is not only the right thing to do but also the most cost-effective way to meet the MDGs. A related UNICEF study, ‘Narrowing the Gaps to Meet the Goals,’ shows that 60 per cent more deaths of children under the age of five could be prevented by targeting aid at those in the most remote areas.

Greatest need, greatest return

“We can’t be satisfied with opportunity for anyone until there is opportunity for everyone,” said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake during his opening statement at the panel discussion. “If we work where there is the greatest need, then we get the greatest return in real results.”
 
At the heart of the discussion was an assessment of the progress made by individual countries – like Bangladesh – and the unique perspectives they brought to achieving the MDGs with equity.

“We should always consider that [children] are our future generation,” said the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina. She added that the international community must carefully consider “how we can assist them, how we can help them and keep the world a safe place.”

Inequities persist

Panellists at the event noted that conventional aid programming has generally aimed to assist the maximum number of recipients – rather than also seeking out those who are especially difficult to reach due to social status, extreme poverty, geographical isolation or gender.
 
As a result – and despite real progress made on the MDGs since world leaders committed to the goals almost a decade ago – gender and geography still play a powerful role in determining the prospects of children in developing countries. In fact, children under five from the poorest and most remote areas are twice as likely to die as their most affluent counterparts in those countries.

Time for urgent action

UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow helped to assess the situation facing the world five years before the MDG deadline.
 
 “In today’s world,” she said, “there’s no acceptable reason for children to starve, to have no education or to be sentenced to death, or a life of disability, because they didn’t have a malaria net, or access to drinkable water, or the same polio vaccine that has been available to us in the developed world for over half a century.”

Ms. Farrow further emphasized the critical importance of achieving the MDGs with equity.
 
 “By reaching out to the poorest people on earth, the most abandoned and the most impoverished, we are really bringing up the entire standard of living for the world that we and our children are going to be living in,” she said.

After the MDG summit’s three vibrant days of events, it is clear that there remains no alternative but to act now – and quickly – to reach the world’s most vulnerable children.

LINKS:
A Case for Geographic Targeting of Basic Social Services to Mitigate Inequalities in Bangladesh
Millennium Development Goals