COMMENT

Alarm on the UN Day

Allow me to present to you the present day situation:" Today, 24,000 people will die of hunger. The poverty and inequality are growing. Over 860 million people throughout the world are illiterate, 98% of them live in the developing countries. One third of the women are physically abused, forced to sex or maltreated in a different way, 70% of the people who live on the verge of poverty are women. Women labour participation in the transition period has decreased.

The rate of employment of men (61.8%) is higher than that of women (38.2%). Every 1.2 second a child is born in poverty, every 3 seconds a child dies of a certain disease, every 7 seconds a child dies of hunger or malnutrition.

Every minute a woman dies of complications at birth. 13,000 people get infected with the HIV/AIDS virus every day. One in every six people in the world does not have access to healthy drinking water.

In the month that passed, the United Nations Organization (UN) marked its day, the 24th of October. This year, that day is dedicated to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG): Rooting out the extreme poverty and hunger; Accomplishing universal primary education; Promoting the gender equality and women empowerment; Reducing the children mortality; Improving the health of the pregnant mothers; Fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; Environmental sustainability; Establishing global development partnerships. In 2000, these goals were accepted and signed by all 189 UN member-countries as an effort to reduce the poverty by 2015. Among them was Macedonia.

The Millennium Development Goals are important for Macedonia, they can help to define the national development priorities, to define its long-term development strategy, to set up real goals that could be reached by 2015, to accomplish social consensus on development issues, to mobilize the political leaders, business community and the development factors and the civil sector and to follow the progress towards the EU standards. Think about it!

 

Daniel Medaroski