BRUSSELS, 13 July. Yesterday, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander De Croo left Brussels for Addis Ababa, where a key summit on financing for development will take place this week.  Young anti-poverty activists from ONE, a campaigning and advocacy organisation of nearly 7 million people, gathered at the airport to wish Minister De Croo a safe trip and to remind him of what they expect at this crucial summit.

Aside from concentrating aid on the poorest countries, leaders must unleash a data revolution to follow the money invested in development and track progress from resources to results. ONE Youth Ambassadors presented Minister De Croo with two giant passports. One showed the Minister’s own details, while the other, belonging to a young girl in Sierra Leone, was blank – showing the reality of the current lack of data in many countries.

Astrid Vanackere, ONE Youth Ambassador, said:

‘Around the world, 1 in 3 births is not registered. How can we expect to know what the needs of the poorest are if they do not exist on paper?  We are here today to ask our Deputy Prime Minister Alexander De Croo to support the poorest countries when he goes to the Addis summit and to make concrete commitments to tackle the problem of missing data.’

Alexander De Croo, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Development Cooperation, said:

‘We have a responsibility to the world’s poorest to finish the job that the Millennium Development Goals started, and we must seize the opportunity to do so now. I am travelling to the development summit with plans to prioritise the very poorest in the Least Developed Countries and promote a global partnership to ensure comprehensive data on development, so we can track global progress.

It is important that the post-2015 development agenda is a sufficiently dynamic one that takes into account the challenges and opportunities of today and of the decades to come. As minister responsible for development aid as well as digital agenda I firmly believe we have to grasp new digital opportunities to realize the sustainable development goals everywhere.’

 ***ENDS***

Notes to editors:

• For more information and interviews, contact ONE: Marion Sharples // [email protected] // +32 (0)2 300 90 55 // +32 (0)471 34 54 64
• About Addis: From July 13-16, the Third International Conference on Financing for Development will be held in Addis Ababa. This conference brings together all countries to decide on how to finance the fight against extreme poverty.
• About ONE: ONE is a campaigning and advocacy organisation of nearly 7 million people taking action to end extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa. Not politically partisan, we raise public awareness and press political leaders to combat AIDS and preventable diseases, increase investments in agriculture and nutrition, and demand greater transparency in poverty-fighting programmes. To learn more, go to one.org.