Ethiopia promising to hit millennium goals – UN official

By Tesfa-alem Tekle

March 26, 2008 (ADDIS ABABA) — Director of the United Nations Millennium Campaign, Salil Shetty said Ethiopia is in a very good position to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

In an exclusive interview he did with ENA, Shetty said that the rate of the growth and reduction of poverty is high and a lot of progress has been made particularly in education and health sectors.

Shetty who cited the successes registered in primary education enrolment and health service coverage as encouraging said that Ethiopia has a massive job to do to catch up in the next seven years.

Without doubt there has been quiet good progress over the last five years in Ethiopia, the Director said and added that the remarkable progresses Ethiopia has made on poverty reduction, expansion of education and health service facilities should be credited.

“I am very pleased that the government of Ethiopia in the last one year has very explicitly been talking about involving the citizens’ and peoples’ organizations much more actively in the process of achieving the MDGs.

That is really where the work of the national campaign comes in and we hope we can support the process in that way.”

Emphasizing on the need for harmonizing the MDGs with local policies, the Director said that not many countries have done what Ethiopia has done to actually mainstreaming the MDGs in to their national planning processes.

The MDGS are very much mainstreamed and harmonized with the planning and monitoring and reporting processes of Ethiopia’s Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty, he said.

The UN Millennium Campaign is widely engaged in involving and mobilizing active participation of the people towards the attainment of the MDGs, he said.

Creating awareness of the people on the MDGs and increasing accountability are the main strategies the Campaign has employed in the drive to achieve the MDGs, the Director added.

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and the entire world’s leading development institutions. They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.

(ST)