Olav Kjørven says that "stakes are high for UN panel replacing MDGs" - but doesn't explain why were MDGs expired and what did they achieved so far?

Read full article on The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/sep/25/replacing-millennium-development-goals?newsfeed=true

Stakes are high for UN panel replacing millennium development goals

The UN panel starting work on a post-2015 development vision faces huge pressure to cover issues left out of the original goals, to decide who to consult and how to set measurable targets

Residents washing clothes on the banks of the Niger River, in central Mali. Their future, along with millions of others, is the focus of UN discussions to replace the MDGs. Photograph: Francois Xavier Marit/AFP/Getty Images

 

For the past 12 years, the millennium development goals (MDGs) have shaped policy, guided political agendas, and channelled hundreds of millions of dollars of aid money around the globe. But with the MDGs due to expire at the end of 2015, the international community is starting to tackle the huge, inevitable follow-up question: what comes next?

The post-MDG process will officially begin on Tuesday, when a UN-appointed committee of international political big-shots will meet for the first time in New York. Led by the UK prime minister David Cameron, Liberia's President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the 26-member committee has been assigned the task of creating a "development vision" to replace the MDGs after they expire.

"The stakes are very, very high," says Ben Leo, global policy director of the anti-poverty organisation, One Campaign. "Not just in terms of money, but also how much time and energy is going to be spent on monitoring and implementing these goals – and creating additional political momentum over the next 10 to 15 years."...

Read full article on The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/sep/25/replacing-millennium-development-goals?newsfeed=true

Helen Clark declares war against UN's Regional Economic Commissions and Kim Won-soo's Change Management Team

Even on a declared "vacation" time, Uncle Helen can't stay without doing nothing. She has led a team of UNDP top advisers in "thinking out of the box" on how to undermine UN's Secretary-General desire to concentrate more power onto his hand on Development agenda.

Helen Clark and a group of "thinkers" are extremely fraustrated with the latest attempts from the Office of Secretary General and more concretely Kim Won-soo and the Swedish Deputy Secretary General who are inclined of stripping UNDP from some of the main "duties" that until now (for almost 60 years) the United Nations Development Programme took them for granted.

But with all the scandals UNDP has gone thru, Ban Ki-moon pressed by some key donor countries is taking away slowly some of them, namely:

- UNDG (Development Group);
- One UN Initiative;
- MDGs and world coordination (recently appointed Jeffrey Sachs and a Committee of world renown experts in this area)
- HC (Humanitarian coordination); and
- RC (Resident Coordinators) ....after many complains from UNICEF, WFP, FAO and UNEP, Ban Ki-moon will be stripping UNDP from the jewel of the UN System - the ability to head the UN work in any country.

But Helen Clark is not known to give up easily. Her advisers (who are mostly connected to United Kingdom) are calling for help from the Kingdom experts in "development". After 5 years of Ban Ki-moon, now UNDP is telling many donors how ineffective Ban's team is and why the donors might have more to loose by letting UN Secretariat to go away with this "crime".

Thus the action plan for September will be to run a massive campaign with Donors and Member States, and destroy the reputation of Regional Economic Commissions (ECLAC, ESCWA, ESCAP, ECE), UN-DESA (Department of Economic and Social Affairs) and most importantly go after Kim Won-so (Ban's stooge).

Will have more about this very soon !