Critics had only one thing left to add: cold water

After a UN poverty summit featuring 140 world leaders, three days of speeches, and thousands of news articles, critics had only one thing left to add: cold water.

No sooner had President Barack Obama urged fresh energy in the campaign to haul the planet’s so-called “bottom billion” out of extreme poverty by 2015, than aid groups demanded a reality check.

The eight Millennium Development Goals, launched in 2000, are an unprecedented attempt at global cooperation to slash child mortality rates, the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, AIDS, and other aspects of extreme hardship.

At ActionAid, an NGO combating hunger, chief executive Joanna Kerr dismissed the three-day UN summit as “an expensive side-show” and “an avalanche of warm sentiment (that) cleverly concealed the fact that no fully funded plans of action for tackling poverty were actually announced.”

Others asked whether governments at the root of misery in the world were the right institutions to implement the Millennium goals, which involve everything from improving health to infrastructure and protecting the environment.

Often the lack of basic services like electricity is caused by “discrimination and other human rights violations,” Amnesty International’s secretary general, Salil Shetty, said.

“In effect, world leaders are asking us to trust them, an incredible demand when we see the gap between what they are required to do and what they have delivered.”