Former French minister to seek new ways to finance fight against poverty

from the International Herald Tribune

UNITED NATIONS: Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed former French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy on Tuesday to look for innovative ways to finance U.N. goals to fight poverty.

The goals include cutting extreme poverty by half, ensuring an elementary school education for all children, and halting and reversing the AIDS pandemic, all by 2015.

Douste-Blazy will serve as Ban's special adviser on innovative financing for development, with the rank of undersecretary-general and a salary of $1 a year.

U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe, who announced the appointment, said aid from governments is insufficient to meet the U.N. Millennium Development Goals and Ban believes it is urgent for innovative sources of funding to be developed to fill the "critical gap."

Douste-Blazy told reporters after a meeting with the secretary-general his goal is to raise money from companies, individuals and other groups to help achieve the U.N. anti-poverty goals.

He said he will organize the first World Conference of Nongovernmental Donors next year.

"We must set up new tools to raise money — and to see where money goes," Douste-Blazy said.

Douste-Blazy trained as a medical doctor and became active in politics, serving in the European Parliament in 1989 and in the French Cabinet on several occasions, most recently as foreign minister from 2005-2007.

He currently chairs the executive board of UNITAID, the International Drug Purchase Facility hosted by the World Health Organization and financed by a tax on airline tickets to provide low-cost drugs to the developing world to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

It stems from a 2004 initiative by former French president Jacques Chirac and Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to make life-saving drugs available to the world's poor.