Inter-Parliamentary Union told to scale up on MDGs and be accountable

17 April 2008

STATEMENT BY ARCHBISHOP NDUNGANE AT THE UNICEF COUNTDOWN TO 2015 CONFERENCE, CAPE TOWN

Archbishop Njongo Ndungane, Founder and President of African Monitor, today called on parliamentarians from the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) member states to gear up in order to ensure that Africa and other developing countries also meet the MDGs by 2015. He was addressing the parliamentarians at the UNICEF’s Countdown to 2015 Conference in Cape Town.

He called on the governments to do more in order to ensure that the MDGs are achieved by 2015, particularly in the areas of maternal health and child mortality, which affect the most vulnerable segment of human beings.

“The Millennium Development Goals are the most important and comprehensive promises that our governments have made for tackling the scourge of poverty”, he said.

He said that continental bodies, like the African Monitor, will always monitor development programming by both governments and donors and advocate for pro-poor and result oriented development programmes that listened to and acted on the voices of poor people.

He emphasized the need to hold public officials who made public promises accountable and said that public pronouncements by duty bearers should be less about public relations and more about true actionable undertakings that translated to the improvement of the situation of the poor, particularly women and children.