Bono on this week’s United Nation’s MDG Summit
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All this week, Bono and Jeffrey Sachs will be blogging for the Financial Times from the United Nation’s summit on the Millennium Development Goals.
As a precursor, the Financial Times conducted a Q & A with Bono. An excerpt is below, and the full piece is at FT.com.
AB: What is this week [and the Millennium Development Goals summit] all about?
Bono: Most of us woke up on New Year’s Day 2000 with a hangover and a hazy memory of a night of pleasant fanfare and dumb parade. However, the new millennium was also celebrated by our commitment to eight goals that would change the planet and demonstrate to the developing world how we might, through a combination of know-how and resources, partner with them in efforts to help millions out of desperate poverty. We gave ourselves 15 years, we’re halfway there. How do we measure up?
AB: What are the two or three goals you want to achieve this week?
Bono: 1. Blogging for the FT, being your roving reporter in the canyons of Manhattan. While the world upends on Wall Street, I’ll be mostly midtown at the UN and the Clinton Global Initiative talking about the resilience of the world’s poor while the world’s rich find out how fragile life can be.
2. Unlock €1bn of unspent European Union Common Agricultural Policy money. This year our farmers don’t qualify for it, food prices are high. African farmers desperately need it.
3. Show what’s working as well as what’s not. Bad news about Africa travels much farther than good news. There will be a historic and innovative announcement on malaria on Thursday – watch out for it. Thanks to debt relief, aid and African leadership, 29m more children are going to school.
Read the full Q & A here.
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September 22, 2008 at 10:03 pm
It really is great to see the Financial Times picking up on the activities in NYC this week surrounding global poverty and the fulfillment of the MDG’s. And there is no better blogger to help people see the scope of this issue than Bono.
I am always heartened to see Bono and others referring to the resilience of the world’s poor. They struggle, day in and day out, just to provide for the simplest of needs for themselves & their families oftentimes well out of the sight of the rest of the world.
But there are those of us who hear their sighs and their cries for help & that is why we are all here AS ONE on their behalf.
And in our movement, there is no room for rock stars or celebrities because before the suffering of the world’s poor, we are all humbled and we are all the same.
Hand in hand, we will form a line of resistance to the apathy and the indifference of a world bent on fulfilling its own desires – oftentimes at the expense of the world’s poorest people.
THANK YOU, BONO and Prof. Jeffrey Sachs for being beacons of light that have led us to this point in our movement.
Please continue to lead us in the direction of Light and Love, Truth and Rights, in our “journey of equality”.
ONE HEART, ONE HOPE, ONE VOICE, ONE LOVE – debbie
http://www.mpwn-uganda.org
October 5, 2008 at 12:45 pm
In 2008, isn’t the time right for the United States of America to re-focus attentions and resources to aid and assist the needs of our Domestic poor and those in need, and finally begin to give less to those in foreign lands?