A NEW report on progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), UK Civil Society Analysis of the UN MDG Review Summit 2010, says that the level of international com­mitment is “weak” and “dis­appoint­ing”, and that a global leaders’ summit did little more than repeat previous promises.

Last September, world leaders met to review progress, five years before the 2015 deadline. The first goal — to halve the proportion of starving people in the developing world — is badly off track, and may even be going backwards. UN figures suggest that the estimated number of people suffering from hunger rose to 925 million in 2010. Similarly, halving the proportion of people in extreme poverty in Africa will take until 2065, at the current rate of progress.

The 2010 summit was intended to kick-start political action. World leaders agreed to consider an “en­hanced” approach to creating per­manent ways of dealing with debt crises — but did not say how it could be done.

Now, 28 charities and NGOs, including Oxfam, Christian Aid, and the Jubilee Debt Campaign, have said that the conclusion of the summit was “far from the ambitious MDGs rescue-plan, with clear financial and political commitments, which is needed to ensure that the MDGs are met by 2015”.

The report calls on the UK gov­ernment to take a global lead in pushing for financial transparency, and support a global mechanism to deal with sovereign-debt prob­lems.

To view the report, visit www.bond.org.uk/data/files/Bond_MDG_Summit_Analysis_2011.pdf