World community must commit to the MDGs with special attention to women: UK minister

UNITED NATIONS, June 28 (Xinhua) -- A focus on women and a strong, accountable commitment from nations are integral to progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Andrew Mitchell, the development minister of the United Kingdom, said here Monday.

Speaking to the press here following his remarks to the High- Level Segment of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), an important annual meeting for the UN organ that tackles economic and social issues with the input of UN agencies and civil society, Mitchell expressed the UK's support for the MDGs.

The UK would like to see these goals set for international development get "a real burst of activity and intensity in September," when world leaders are scheduled to meet at the General Assembly to discuss progress towards the goals, he said.

With the 2015 deadline for accomplishing the MDGs approaching rapidly, Mitchell and the UK expressed the need for action.

"Now with five years to go, many of them are massively off track and we need to do something to demonstrate our absolute commitment to making sure that these goals are achieved, to give hope to people living in dire poverty and deprivation around the world," Mitchell said. "I think we want to see measurable outcomes. I think we want to see, every year a proper assessment of how far we have got and what more we can do."

Mitchell called for a particular focus on MDG 5, maternal health, which he called "the mother of all of these MDGs." He stressed that the UK, including Prime Minister David Cameron are advocating strongly for the achievement of this goal, which is currently the most off-track of all MDGs.

Mitchell accentuated the importance of women to international development, a point he also stressed at his speech to ECOSOC earlier in the day.

"You can't really look at development for more than five minutes without having an understanding, in Hillary Clinton's words, that women are front and center of all issues of development," he said.

According to Mitchell, the UK also supports the new gender entity that has been proposed for the UN, and supports the utmost fiscal responsibility for the agency when it is created.

"I think its worth making the point that we want this to be an effective body which really can champion the importance of improving the lives of women throughout the world and particularly the developing world," he said. "In order to achieve that its got to have effective structures. It also needs to have structures which the donor community, the international donor community accept and respect. Otherwise the history of this is that donors will fade away from supporting the new entity and it won't achieve anything like its full potential."

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