President Nguyen Minh Triet will attend the United Nations High-level Plenary Meeting on the Millennium Development Goals in the UN Headquarters in New York from September 20-22.

President Nguyen Minh Triet will attend the United Nations High-level Plenary Meeting on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG Summit) in the UN Headquarters in New York from September 20-22.

President Triet and his US counterpart Barack Obama will co-host the second ASEAN-US Summit in New York on September 24.

The MDG Summit is aimed at accelerating progress towards achieving the MDGs and is themed “We can end poverty by 2015.”

Coinciding with the 65th meeting of the UN General Assembly, the MDG Summit will be attended by heads of state and other dignitaries, as well as members of civil society, academia and business.

The three-day event will see daily morning and afternoon plenary sessions held concurrently with round-table session on the following six themes: Addressing the challenge of poverty, hunger and gender equality; Meeting the goals of health and education; Promoting sustainable development; Addressing emerging issues and evolving approaches; Addressing the special needs of the most vulnerable; and Widening and strengthening partnerships.

According to a report by specialists from the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI), which was released on September 14, between 1990-2004, Vietnam has made “unprecedented progress” in improving the lives of the country’s poor.

The country has managed to halve the proportion of malnourished children and reduce the proportion of people earning less than one dollar a day, from two thirds to one-fifth of the population during this period, said the Institute.

|ODI also reported that Ghana, in Africa, has made a big leap forward in implementing the targeted MDGs.

The country has reduced starvation levels by nearly three-quarters, from 34 percent in 1990 to nine percent in 2004 and has outperformed every other country in the world.

Ten other African countries, including Ethiopia, Egypt and Angola, have also halved their poverty levels, according to the ODI.

In its report, the ODI critisised several countries because of a lack of progress in their efforts to achieve the UN’s MDGs, especially in poverty reduction and universal access to education.

PV