United Nations Millennium Development Goals
Overview I Programme I Resources I Media Info I Take Action
MDG Success:
Accelerating Action and Partnering for Impact
In September 2013, the Secretary-General hosted a high-level forum to catalyze and accelerate further action to achieve the MDGs. The event focused on concrete examples of scaling up success and identifying opportunities for more. The emphasis will be on the “how” – bringing together examples from partnerships across the spectrum of MDGs and Secretary-General’s initiatives. It is intended that the outcomes of the forum will enrich the deliberations of the General Assembly on the 24 and 25 of September, and beyond.
The Secretary-General’s event replaced multiple single issue events with one coherent day-long event that drew lessons across issue areas and mobilized support for the full range of MDGs. This provided a platform for progress on the Secretary- General’s initiatives and validated his vision for strengthening strategic partnership across the UN system.
The event allowed for structured dialogues on lessons and strategies across issue areas, focusing on key functional elements such as achieving scale, accountability and innovation, to ensure country-level implementation and ownership, and key players with a critical role to accelerate progress. The event drew from multi-stakeholder initiatives and movements such as Every Woman Every Child, Sustainable Energy for All, the Global Education First Initiative, Zero Hunger Challenge, the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement, and the Call to Action on Sanitation, whose goals and activities span the MDGs.
The event showcased joint efforts, pushed for refined, actionable and highly-motivated "last mile” commitments in each issue area and across the board, offering the experience of the different Secretary-General’s multistakeholder partnership initiatives as a model to chart the way forward. Folding the initiatives into one full day session demonstrated enhanced coherence around the development agenda and its means of implementation – and it helped push the debate on partnership as critical tool for mobilizing finance, expertise, knowledge, and broad coalitions of leaders around UN goals and mandates.
As recognized by the Report of the High-level Panel on Post-2015, we must leverage the strength of all actors whose deeds, products and services come to bear on development if we are to achieve our goals. Under the Secretary-General’s leadership, and with high level participation by Heads of State and Government, the President of the General Assembly, business CEOs, philanthropists, civil society leaders, as well as heads of UN agencies, funds and programmes and other international organizations, the event presented an opportunity to focus on the means of implementation that match ambitions with concrete mechanisms and resources.
The event was held on Monday, 23 September, in the Trusteeship Council. It also utilized global online outreach, the Social Good Summit (22-24 September at the 92nd Street Y) and the 1000 minutes social media rally convened in April among MDG partners around the world.
