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| | Message from Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, on the occasion of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty - 17 October 2005
17-10-2005 - Worldwide poverty was responsible for the death of an estimated 270 million people between 1990 and 2004, which is more than four times the number of deaths during the two World Wars. |
Even though some progress has been made in recent years, the figures remain daunting and present us with an urgent ethical challenge. From 1990 to 2001, rates of extreme poverty fell rapidly in many countries of Asia (from 39.4% to 29.9% for Southern Asia), slowly in Latin America (from 11.3% to 9.5%), changed little in Northern Africa and Western Asia, and increased from low levels in the transition economies of South-Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In sub-Saharan Africa, which had the highest poverty rates in the world, the rate of extreme poverty increased from 44.6% in 1990 to 46.4% in 2001.
Thus, while poverty rates fell in some regions, they increased in others. Clearly, there is an urgent need for anti-poverty efforts to continue and for all aspects of poverty to be addressed. This, indeed, was the commitment made by the international community through the Millennium Declaration, a commitment that recently was re-affirmed by world leaders at the United Nations Summit in New York in September 2005.
UNESCO has committed itself to addressing the poverty challenge through all its fields of competence, especially through education. It was therefore most gratifying to see the following statement (paragraph 43) in the Summit’s outcome document: “We emphasize the critical role of both formal and informal education in the achievement of poverty eradication and other development goals as envisaged in the Millennium Declaration, in particular basic education and training for eradicating illiteracy, and strive for expanded secondary and higher education as well as vocational education and technical training, especially for girls and women, the creation of human resources and infrastructure capabilities and the empowerment of those living in poverty. In this context, we reaffirm the Dakar framework for action adopted at the World Education Forum in 2000 and recognize the importance of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization strategy for the eradication of poverty, especially extreme poverty, in supporting the Education for All programmes as a tool to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015”.
The link between education, especially Education for All (EFA), and anti-poverty efforts, on the one hand, and the world’s development agenda, on the other, could not be clearer. Indeed, without massive strides towards reducing illiteracy, expanding educational opportunities and improving the quality of education, it is difficult to see how poverty can be eradicated or how the development potential of all countries can be realized.
In this year when UNESCO is celebrating its 60th anniversary through a sixty-week process of awareness-raising, advocacy, debate and mobilization, the Organization has dedicated the week beginning 17 October to the fight against poverty. Events will take place at Headquarters and in field offices. UNESCO’s commitment to fighting poverty, especially extreme poverty, through its year-round work in education, the sciences, culture, communication and information will be highlighted, as will its partnerships with governments, UN agencies, civil society and the private sector.
For UNESCO, the eradication of poverty is both an ethical imperative and a development imperative. Poverty is a denial of human development and, as such, it is contrary to the fundamental values and principles on which UNESCO is based. On the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty 2005, I re-affirm UNESCO’s commitment to do all it can to rid the world of the scourge of poverty.
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Office of the Spokesperson
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