UNDP chief: 'We are looking forward to meeting Premier Wen'
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Helen Clark, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), told Xinhua that she is looking forward to meeting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on the sidelines of the upcoming high-level UN meetings.
Premier Wen will discuss a number of important issues during two United Nations conferences to be held at the UN Headquarters in New York on Sept. 21-23, during which he will address the high- level UN meeting on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the general debate of the 65th session of the UN General Assembly.
"We are expecting to be signing a very important agreement with China on the sidelines of the summit, so we are looking forward to that," Clark said.
Clark became the administrator of the United Nations Development Program on April 17, 2009, and she is the first woman to lead the organization. Prior to her appointment with UNDP, Clark served for nine years as the prime minister of New Zealand, serving three successive terms from 1999-2008.
China's living proof
"The message we want to send is that the MDGs can be met," Clark said. "China is living proof that the MDGs can be met, China has lifted hundreds and hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty, it's got its children in schools, it's got its health services out there, tackles diseases, it's moving now on its environmental sustainability issues."
"So we need to draw all the lessons and then insights that we can from experiences where countries have made significant progress and hopefully inspire others to tackle the obstacles that stand in the way," she said.
"We think that the global target on poverty will be met, but it 's largely because China has been so successful and if we were to take the figures without China, it wouldn't look so good," she said. "So we are very grateful that China has been so successful, but we would like to help bring that kind of success to other countries as well."
"On primary education for all the children, we're making good progress but we need to speed it up," she said. "We could reach that goal as a world, we can reach the infant and child health target but we need to speed up, we need a lot more work on mother' s health."
"On gender empowerment, I think we're making a lot of progress, but again we're a bit short of that -- 30 percent of women as national legislators, that needs more commitment from countries at this time," she said. "On HIV/AIDS we think that the targets will be met, but it's still a serious situation and we can never relax our grip on the importance of this."
"With respect to water, we think that the water MDG target will be met, but on sanitation, there needs to be a lot more priority to proper sewage disposal systems and really investing in that basic public health infrastructure," she said. "Biodiversity also comes into the MDGs, this is a very important year with the big biodiversity conference in Nagoya in Japan, and the high-level meeting of the General Assembly -- and we'd like for all countries to be giving more attention to the protection of unique species."
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