From Rhetoric to Action: How Tony Blair is Leading the Way to Make Poverty History in Africa

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, world leaders agreed to eight Millennium Development Goals, which aim to significantly reduce poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation by 2015. The eighth of these goals is to develop a global partnership for development, where developed countries would facilitate growth in developing countries through aid, trade and debt relief. At the 2002 International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, leaders from developed countries recommitted to this eighth goal. In the years that have followed, progress has been made in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, but it has been uneven and too slow. In 2004, recognizing that Africa was the only continent which was not on track to achieve any of the Millennium Development Goals, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair established the Commission for Africa to gather evidence on how to meet the specific development needs of Africa.This summer, as president of both the European Council and the G8, Tony Blair has put the needs of Africa at the top of the international agenda. At the Gleneagles summit, Tony Blair chaired over the adoption of the biggest aid plan for Africa that the G8 has ever agreed. As world leaders prepare for the UN Millennium Review Summit this September, Blair continues to push his colleagues to turn the rhetoric to action, and be the generation that makes poverty history