United Nations Millennium Promise Partners Meeting

I attended an outstanding UN conference in New York Recently for the Millennium Promise Partners, the brainchild of Jeff Sachs, Global Economist. Of the 250 people in attendance was The President of Senegal, The President of Mulawi, the President of Uganda, the Director of the World Food Programme, the Director of the Bill Gates Foundation and Quincy Jones, to name a few.

The mission of Millennium Promise is to support the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to halve extreme poverty in Africa by 2015. Millennium Promise works with impoverished communities, national and local governments, and partner organizations to implement high-impact programs aimed at transforming lives on the continent and engaging donor nations, corporations, and the general public in the effort. Our work is premised on the belief that, for the first time in history, our generation has the opportunity to end extreme poverty, hunger, and disease.

Millennium Promise also plays a leading role in mobilizing the private sector to find solutions to key problems that contribute to extreme poverty in Africa, like malaria which kills more than one million people every year. Millennium Promise is a founding partner of Malaria No More, an initiative launched at the December 2006 White House Summit on Malaria that seeks to galvanize corporations, foundations, faith-based groups, grassroots networks, and the public to support a comprehensive approach to controlling the deadly, yet preventable disease.