Transcript Engaging Congregations in Achieving the Millennium

Engaging Congregations
in Achieving the
Millennium Development Goals
Jon Singletary
Baylor Center for Family & Community Ministries
Seeds of Hope, Council of Stewards
What are MDGs?
At the Millennium Summit in 2000, the leaders of almost 200 countries
adopted the UN Millennium Declaration, making a commitment to a
new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a
series of targets, with a deadline of 2015, that have become known as
the Millennium Development Goals.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the world's targets for
addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions - income, hunger,
disease, shelter, and exclusion - while promoting gender equality,
education, and environmental sustainability. They also promote basic
human rights - the rights of each person on the planet to health,
education, shelter, and security.
However, these are not merely secular goals. Jesus calls us to
care for the poor and promote justice for the oppressed. From
his command to love our neighbor to his reminder that he came
so that we might have life, we hear calls to faithful action as his
disciples.
The Millennium Development Goals offer us a response to Jesus
call to care. They reflect God’s passionate desire for service and
love, for justice and mercy.
Because charity is not enough, we see in these goals an
opportunity to embody God’s justice in a suffering world.
Goal 1: Eradicate Extreme Hunger and Poverty
Goal 2: Achieve Universal Primary Education
Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower
Women
Goal 4: Reduce Child Mortality
Goal 5: Improve Maternal Health
Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other
diseases
Goal 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability
Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for
Development
Global Economic Principles for
Reducing Extreme Poverty
Reducing Debt
Improving Trade
Increasing Effective Aid
Each of these factors has an impact on how we
address the MDGs…
Consider the situation in Zambia…
• For many years, copper in Zambia was used to create wealth.
When copper prices fell in the 1970’s, the country found itself
borrowing money and building up international debts.
• By the 1990’s, debt repayment programs prevented Zambia
from investing in education, health care and other resources
to help strengthen its own economy, such as roads.
• Trading copper-based products remains a challenge because
of tariffs charged by wealthy nations on the import of
manufactured copper products; trade is not free or fair.
• Cotton, another Zambian export, isn’t traded successfully
because U.S. & European agribusiness subsidies keep cotton
prices artificially low.
• Today, Zambia has received some debt reduction assistance,
allowing it to develop some infrastructure. However, the
nation must still spend twice as much on repaying debt as it
spends on education and health care combined.
• Effective aid from the U.S., in the form of poverty-focussed
development assistance, has provided borehole wells, antimalarial medications, and mosquito nets.
• Here we see examples of how the impact of debt, trade, and
aid can make a difference.
• In a sub-saharan country, like Zambia, the MDG’s are being
promoted to offer: sustainable development, debt reduction,
aid to strengthen health care for malaria and HIV/AIDS
treatment, education to empower women, locally grown and
traded foods & safe water, and an overall reduction in
poverty.
Websites for more info…
E4GR - Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation
(www.e4gr.org)
CBF - Cooperative Baptist Fellowship
(www.thefellowship.info)
Micah Challenge (www.micah.org)
The ONE Campaign (www.one.org)
Bread for the World (www.bread.org)
Christian Education Resources
• God’s Mission in the World: An Ecumenical
Christian Study Guide on Global Poverty and
the Millennium Development Goals
(www.episcopalchurch.org/eppn)
• Eradicating Global Poverty: A Christian Study
Guide on the MDGs (Friendship Press)