Grammy winner Nile Rodgers takes on crusade against poverty

from The Malaysian Star

UNITED NATIONS (AP): Grammy award winner Nile Rodgers is taking on a new crusade -- fighting global poverty.

The Grammy Awards producer and lifetime achievement winner will produce a festival in June featuring international celebrities and entertainers that will culminate an educational campaign to galvanize people around the world to help achieve U.N. anti-poverty goals by 2015.

"It is my great honor to be involved in this project,'' Rodgers told a press conference Wednesday at U.N. headquarters. "This is a very difficult goal to achieve, but ... I can't believe that it's going to be anything but positive and fantastic.''

The goals include cutting in half the number of people living on $1 (euro.72) a day or less, ensuring that every child has a primary school education, cutting in half the number of people without clean water and sanitation, and halting and reversing the AIDS pandemic.

Rodgers presented an award to General Assembly President Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa on behalf of the Public-Private Alliance Foundation for her work in promoting the Millennium Development Goals, which were adopted by world leaders at a U.N. summit in 2000.

Al Khalifa, whose yearlong term ends next week, called for a global partnership to achieve the goals, saying "this is truly the greatest gift that we could give to humanity.''

"We truly face a `development emergency' ... but there is hope,'' she said. "If we act now, and act together, we can reverse this alarming trend. But unless we act decisively, by 2015 millions of people will still be struggling on less than one dollar a day, and millions of children will still go hungry.''

Rodgers said details of the June 12 Millennium Development Goals Awards Festival and Telecast will be announced in the coming months.

"We will achieve everything that we set out to achieve, if not more,'' he promised.