U.K. PM Cameron Works To Include ‘Zero’ Goals In U.N. Post-2015 Development Report, Meets With President Obama

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron “is fighting plans to place a commitment to reducing income inequality in the developing world into a major U.N. report that will set out a series of targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),” instead urging “the U.N. [to] focus on ‘measurable, concrete’ goals,” such as “ending extreme poverty and hunger by 2030,” The Guardian reports. Cameron believes a focus on a goal to “reduce income equality” “is a mistaken approach and says the focus should instead be on agreeing 10 goals, to be achieved by 2030, which it regards as the ‘building blocks’ to tackle poverty in the developing world,” the newspaper writes, noting, “The goals are: ending extreme poverty, ending hunger, ensuring the provision of safe and sustainable water supplies, stopping preventable deaths, ensuring a school place for every girl and boy, empowering girls and women, delivering infrastructure and energy, boosting jobs, ensuring access to justice and ensuring effective and open government.”

In related news, “Cameron’s talks at the White House this week focused in part on the G8 summit he is to host in Northern Ireland next month,” The Guardian reports. Cameron was expected on Tuesday to “announce that Britain is to use its G8 presidency to agree a new international approach on dementia, which affects 35.6 million people in the world,” the newspaper notes (Watt, 5/14). However, “[t]he ongoing crisis in Syria dominated the talks on Monday (May 13) between U.S. President Barack Obama” and Cameron, Devex reports. “To boost the response to the crisis, Cameron pledged an additional 30 million pounds ($46 million) in humanitarian aid,” the news service writes, noting, “The new funding is expected to provide 224,000 people with access to necessary health care services and 172,000 people with access to food, as well as vouchers to 100,000 people for essential items such as food, clothing, clean water and sanitation facilities.” In addition, “Obama said the G8 summit presents ‘another opportunity to make progress on nutrition and food security,'” and “[h]e also noted that both countries ‘are encouraged by the ambitious reforms’ being implemented at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, ‘where both our nations are stepping up efforts,'” according to Devex (Villarino, 5/14).

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