The 68th session of the General Assembly has started, with world leaders gathering in New York to discuss the most pressing humanitarian and development issues that citizens are facing. These include reaching the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which have a target of 2015. To this effect, the Secretary-General will host a high-level forum in the UN’s Trusteeship Council today, Monday September 23, to catalyze and accelerate further action to achieve the MDGs – which range from halving extreme poverty rates to halting the spread of AIDS and providing universal primary education.
The forum will focus on concrete examples of scaling up success and identifying further opportunities. Heads of State and Government, the President of the General Assembly, business CEOs, philanthropists and civil society leaders, as well as top UN and World Bank leadership will present their vision for matching ambitions with concrete mechanisms and resources.
The event includes a special forward-looking panel, ‘The Next Generation: Leveraging Innovations and Partnerships for Scaled Impact,’ which features successful leaders who are innovating in both technology and global development. Participants include Bill Gates, Co-Chair, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and founder of Microsoft, Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook and author of Lean In, Jens Stoltenberg, Prime Minister of Norway, and Anne Bouverot, Director General of the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA). The panel will be moderated by Dr. Judith Rodin, President, Rockefeller Foundation.
Global Pulse is one of the Secretary-General’s special initiatives which will be featured at today’s event, alongside Every Woman Every Child, Zero Hunger Challenge, Sustainable Energy for All, and the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement, as an example of how multi-stakeholder partnerships can accelerate progress.
Directly in line with the High Level Panel’s call for a Data Revolution, over the last four years, Global Pulse has explored innovative methods for combining new types of digital data with traditional indicators to track development and provide early warning of emerging vulnerabilities in real time. To do so, Global Pulse has brought together partners from across the UN system, academia, the open-source technology community and private sector to collaborate on cutting-edge data innovations. A Pulse Lab was established in Indonesia in 2012, and a second country-level lab in Uganda will be established later this year, to further advance “Big Data for Development” efforts, and engage with the private sector around data philanthropy.
You can tune in to a live webcast of the event at starting at 10 am. The innovation panel will start at 16:15.
