UN Budget Shortfall Financial Industry Receives 10 Times More Money in 1 year than Poor Countries Receive in 49 Years

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I am back to posting to this blog, hopefully on a regular and more frequent basis. Although I raised a number of different aspects of the Millennium Development Goals that will need to be addressed to see their successful implantation, the most critical one is still funding, only things are getting worse. Two sources on the same subject, one from Change.org and the other from the Millennium Campaign.

Budget Shortfall from Change.org

It seems like everyone is facing a massive budget gap this year, and the United Nations is no different. Of the $9 billion that the UN was supposed to receive for humanitarian aid this year, the organization has only received half. And that's despite the fact that more people - some say upwards of 43 million people - are relying on UN aid than ever before. Humanitarian Relief blogger Michael Kleinman studies the budget shortfall at the UN and how this might impact humanitarian relief throughout the globe. Turns out that the problem is partly about a lack of money, and partly about a lack of political will. (Read More)

Directly from the United States Millennium Campaign which reported that on June 23, 2009 , the United Nations Millennium Campaign released an analysis showing that since the inception of aid (overseas development assistance) almost 50 years ago, donor countries have given some $2 trillion in aid. Yet over the past year, $18 trillion has been found globally to bail out banks and other financial institutions.

The stark contrast between the money dispersed to the world's desperately poor after 49 years of painstaking summits and negotiations and the staggering sums found virtually overnight to bail out the creators of the global economic crisis makes it impossible for governments to any longer claim that the world can't find the money to help the 50,000 people who are dying of extreme poverty every day," said Salil Shetty, Director of the United Nations Millennium Campaign. "This is a straightforward question of political will. Rich countries' priorities will become crystal clear at this week's summit on the economic crisis, where we hope they will finally deliver on the aid they have repeatedly pledged but not delivered to those who need it most."

The Campaign is therefore calling on donor countries to immediately and unconditionally do the following:

• Agree to a timetable to accelerate delivery of their aid commitments.
• Make rapid progress toward achieving the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda to simplify and streamline aid, including a clear timetable for implementation of existing commitments.
• Reduce and/or eliminate all trade-distorting agricultural subsidies.
• Ensure that poor countries are fully represented in all decision making bodies and in the restructuring of the global financial infrastructure.

Millennium Campaign is calling on poor countries to immediately do the following:

• that national development policies and plans are pro-poor and focused on women and excluded groups.
• Prioritize expenditures on the Millennium Development Goals.
• Ensure accountability and transparency in the management of public money.
• Prioritize domestic resource mobilization.

Go to www.youtube.com/mcampaign to watch the videoclip.

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Taking the Measure of Chronic Poverty

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This weblog is big on the numbers. Helping Understanding With Numbers at the left hand column features sites, including GapMinder, that provide a better understanding of the world through statistics.

The ability to accurately measure the extent of the problems facing the world, the challenge required to overcome those problems, and the effectiveness of the solutions devised takes the number crunchers. This blog has already featured the International Budget Project which builds civil society budget capacity to enhance public participation and to combat poverty and teaches others How to use Budget Analysis to Advance Human Rights (pdf) .

The Chronic Poverty Research Centre is another such organization that uses numbers to educate world leaders and us on the devastating impact of not addressing the Millennium Development Goals.

· CPRC - Chronic Poverty Reports Area - Report 2008-9

CPRC is an international partnership of universities, research institutes and NGOs established in 2000 with initial funding from the UK's Department for International Development.

• Four years ago, the Chronic Poverty Research Centre published the Chronic Poverty Report 2004-05. This was the first major international development report to focus on the estimated 320 to 445 million people who live trapped in chronic poverty – people who will remain poor for much or all of their lives and whose children are likely to inherit their poverty. These chronically poor experience multiple deprivations, including hunger, under-nutrition, illiteracy, lack of access to safe drinking water and basic health services, social discrimination, physical insecurity and political exclusion. Many will die prematurely of easily preventable deaths.

Diigo tags: poverty, odi, mdg