High-Level Meeting To Assess Progress Since 1995 UN Social Summit
United Nations Member States are poised to assess the progress of meeting the commitments they made at the 1995 Social
Summit, including eradicating poverty and promoting full employment, universal access to quality education and
accelerated development in Africa.
The occasion is a session of the 46-member UN Commission on Social Development beginning tomorrow. Its concluding
document will be relayed through the Economic and Social Council to the General Assembly's high-level review in
September of the Millennium Development Goals ), which aim to halve extreme poverty by 2015.
Some 40 ministerial and other high-level delegations will take part in the Commission from 9 to 18 February, the
Commission Chairman, South African Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, told journalists at a headquarters news conference.
Three simultaneous roundtables of cabinet ministers, academics, civil society representatives and, maybe, private sector
executives will examine the implementation of the 1995 commitments in the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development
and Programme of Action and their links to the MDGs, he said.
Governments alone could not achieve the social development goals, Mr. Kumalo added.
In reaffirming the Copenhagen Declaration, the Commission will explore such issues as social exclusion, unemployment and
the particular problems of youth and the elderly, as well as the social catalysts for conflict, including
discrimination, human rights abuses and poverty, the South African representative said.
Answering a question about African development, Mr. Kumalo said to implement social development policies the continent
needed international partnerships and attention paid to the realities of ordinary people's lives. Most people had
forgotten that East Africans had been affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami, he added.
A session background paper says, "Among the many economic factors that are obstacles to, or undermine, poverty reduction
are low or unevenly distributed economic growth, high unemployment, heavy external debt, trade system barriers, high
levels of income inequality and commodity dependency."
It asks for recommendations to improve the coherence of international policies and arrangements to make them more
conducive to poverty reduction.