Brown, UN seek big business to tackle world poverty

from AFP via Google

LONDON (AFP) — Global businesses need to do more to help alleviate poverty in the developing world, Gordon Brown said Tuesday as he prepared to host a major conference on the issue.

"This year must be a year of action if we are to tackle the development emergency we face," he said in a statement released before meeting the heads of more than 80 multi-nationals as well as the leaders of Ghana and Rwanda here.

The event, called Business Call to Action, is designed to highlight work already being undertaken by more than a dozen blue chip firms, including Citi, Coca-Cola, Diageo, Microsoft, Sumitomo Chemical, Thomson Reuters and Vodafone.

Brown hopes their examples will spur others into action to help meet the UN's eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce global poverty by their 2015 deadline.

The UN has expressed concern that many of the targets are off-track at the half-way point of the programme. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has convened a meeting on MDGs in September to give fresh impetus to the process.

"Today's event is about enlisting the support and expertise of global business to develop new and innovative ways to spread growth, prosperity and opportunity in poor countries around the world," Brown added.

"This morning more than a dozen global companies are announcing new initiatives which use their unique business skills to solve problems on the ground and to transform people's lives."

As finance minister Brown and former prime minister Tony Blair pushed debt relief and aid for the world's poorest nations up the global agenda, particularly at the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005.

On his first visit to the UN as prime minister last July, Brown called on governments, businesses, non-governmental organisations and faith groups to come together in a global "coalition for justice" to meet MDG targets.

He has since sought to increase overseas aid in areas like achieving universal education, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases -- all MDGs.

He also believes world bodies that were set up in the wake of World War II, including the UN, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, need to be reorganised to meet the challenges of the 21st century.