Beyond 2015 – the Next Steps for the
MDGs
The United Nations Millennium
Development Campaign came together in 2002 and promoted the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) in a concerted effort to mobilize global partnerships
to reduce extreme poverty by 2015. It is
now the beginning of that target year and, while there has been significant
progress towards the goals, poverty continues to be a major global issue. At
Grassroots, we think that access to financial services can be part of a package
of tools that can help people raise themselves out of poverty and our approach is
designed to ensure that the potential of microfinance to benefit poor clients
is, in fact, realized. With the approach
of 2015, the UN drafted a new agenda which will be officially adopted at the
Special Summit on Sustainable Development in September. The goal is to learn from the past 15 years,
benchmark where we are now in relation to the goals that were set for 2015, and
adopt a new agenda from now until 2030.
The new, post-2015 agenda is ‘buttressed by science and evidence” and is
“built on principles of human rights, the rule of law, equality and
sustainability”. Grassroots believes
that this is an opportunity for the microfinance community to recommit to its core
mission of poverty reduction and align and coordinate itself with the other
initiatives in support of the post-2015 MDG agenda.
