Seminar on Eradicating Poverty hosted by WCC

On 18th October 2004, a seminar on eradicating poverty took place at the WCC’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Joining the WCC general secretary for the event were the World Bank (WB) president, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) deputy managing director, among many other representatives.

The half-day seminar was entitled, “The challenge of poverty eradication”, and focused on how churches and governments can unite in achieving the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to halve world poverty.

The UK government Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Paul Boateng commented, "We do not lack the awareness, we do not lack the science, we do not lack the resources. We have the technology, the medicine, the expertise - and the costs are not prohibitive. What the developed word lacks is the will to make reality of our Millennium promise."

The general secretary of the WCC, Samuel Kobia gave his backing, saying that the goals had already been set, and now all that was needed was the will to move forward in achieving those goals.

Kobia stated that since the MDG’s were created, “very little has been achieved in alleviating the plight of more than three billion poor people in the world who live on less than two dollars a day," and that poverty-related casualties "would outnumber deaths caused by the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the same period". "If destruction of life were the yardstick, then that challenges the powerful and rich nations to take poverty with even more seriousness than they take the WMD."

He continued by saying that poverty “can only be eradicated if inequality in sharing of the global resources is addressed". "It is now evident that economic growth alone does not eradicate poverty, particularly when such growth is based on a model of development that enhances inequity within and between nations," and when "unregulated financial markets transfer financial resources from poor countries to rich ones".

In Africa in particular, eradication of poverty would take "external support and solidarity (...) to accompany African initiatives such as the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD)," and measures like "intensification of debt cancellation," "introduction of an international currency transaction tax," "to prevent capital flight to offshore tax havens," and "reforming financial and trade institutions to make them more transparent," said Kobia.

UK representative, Boateng said that “external support and solidarity” should come from the world’s richest countries, including his own. He said that the richest countries should “write off more debt, dismantle our damaging trade barriers, and commit more money towards international aid and development.”

He continued, “to urgently increase the overall level of resources going from rich to poor" by about "an additional $50 billion a year in aid" - the UK government proposes to create an International Finance Facility.

Boateng mentioned that the initiative was already being supported by the Roman Catholic Church’s Holy See, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. He added that this would represent a “faster, stable and predictable financing vehicle” for making resources for education, health, economic development, debt relief and trade more available.

A call was then made by the UK representative for more religious groups to join, and help in the bid to create better living conditions for the world’s impoverished.

African WCC president, Agnes Aboum agreed saying, “The efforts of the poor and faith-based organisations who have worked on poverty for a very long time must be included in the MDG agenda for it to be successful.”

Among other attendees were representatives from missions in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Lesotho, Rwanda, Botswana, Cameroon, and the African Union, as well as the World Bank, the UN Millennium Campaign, the International Labour Organization, the Lutheran World Federation, the All Africa Conference of Churches, the Anglican Communion and the Church of North India.

The MDG’s include eradicating hunger, reducing child mortality, providing universal primary education, empowering women, combating AIDS, improving maternal health, sustaining the environmental, and developing global partnership for development. The scheme was launched in 2000 with these specific millennium goals, and last Friday, at the fourth year anniversary of the program, hundreds of Christian organisations joined to celebrate the launch of the ‘Micah Challenge’ – a campaign to halve the world’s poverty by 2015 through the MDG’s.