HISTORIC PRESS RELEASE : Prime Minister backs poverty campaign [October 2008]

The press release issued by 10 Downing Street on 17 October 2008.

Gordon Brown has sent a message of support to organisers and participants of the Stand Up Take Action campaign that will see tens of millions of people take part in Stand Up Against Poverty events across 100 countries this weekend.

In the message, the PM reiterated the campaign’s call for action to be taken now on achieving the Millennium Development Goals and said there was a “vast amount of effort needed” to get the goals back on track.

The “inspirational” UN summit on the MDGs held in September had shown that it is possible to “create an alliance for action that can and will deliver” on the development targets, he said.

TEXT OF MESSAGE

Thank you all for Standing Up and Taking Action this weekend in support of the Millennium Development Goals.

This weekend marks the focus of this year’s Stand Up Take Action campaign, bringing together citizens from across the world to urge their leaders to take action in support of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – a set of clear, measurable goals by which the world’s leaders pledged to halve extreme poverty by 2015.

In 2007, 43.7 million people participated in Stand Up worldwide, to express their commitment to ending world poverty. This year, this powerful civil society campaign is asking people to go one step further and take action themselves in their own communities to support the world’s poorest people and raise awareness of some of the key challenges they face – from water and sanitation, to food supply and agriculture, to education and malaria.

Stand Up Take Action is absolutely right that we must act now. We know that the global collective effort on the MDGs is yielding results, even in some of the world’s most challenging regions. But we also know that there is still a vast amount of effort needed if we are to get back on track to meeting the MDGs, particularly in the face of new challenges such as the global economic slowdown, food security and climate change. It is imperative that we do more and that we do it better.

The UK is leading by example. At the Gleneagles Summit in 2005, the G8 committed to work with other donors to increase aid by $50 billion, to $130 billion by 2010. And by 2013, the UK government will reach our target of spending 0.7% of national income on aid. We have clearly laid out our plans to reach this goal and we are encouraging our partners to do likewise.

I was in New York on 25 September for the UN’s High Level Event on global poverty. This was a truly inspirational day that brought together the broadest alliance ever assembled to fight global poverty and resulted in $16 billion pledged to achieving the MDGs. And what the event demonstrated so powerfully is that a coordinated effort is so much more than the sum of its parts and together we can take a coalition of the concerned – governments, faith groups, cities, NGOs, foundations, trusts and businesses – and create an alliance for action that can and will deliver the MDGs.

Thank you for your commitment and for your action. I look forward to continuing to work with GCAP and the Millennium Campaign and our civil society partners to realise the promises we have made to the world’s poor.