Sachs Tapped To Advise U.N. on Global Poverty

Stone Professor of International Trade Jeffrey D. Sachs ’76 will advise the United Nations on research aimed at significantly decreasing world poverty, disease and preventable death by 2015.

Sachs, who also directs Harvard’s Center for International Development (CID), was appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as Special Adviser on the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals for a one-year term that began Feb. 1.

The goals—eight major long-term initiatives on concerns like health, the environment and poverty were formulated by over 160 countries in September of 2000.

By 2015, the U.N. aims to halve the number of people who earn less than a dollar a day, are hungry or cannot access safe drinking water.

The goals also pledge that the U.N. will work to provide early education to children of both genders, reduce deaths in childbirth by three quarters, reduce deaths of children under the age of five by two thirds, and halt and begin to reverse the spread of AIDS, malaria and other diseases—all by 2015.

The eighth major goal is to improve the lives of 100 million “slum dwellers” by 2020.

While agreeing that the goals are ambitious, Sachs called them “exciting for that reason” and “achievable.”

“The amazing thing about the time we’re living in is that there really has been a lot of economic progress in a lot of the world,” he said.

He said that efforts by developed nations as well as new technological and scientific breakthroughs could allow the U.N. to achieve its goals.

“There’s a part of the world that is in an absolutely desperate condition where people are literally dying every day,” Sachs said. “The fact that the rich have gotten so rich makes it possible to actually help [poor countries] solve their problems and make a real historic breakthrough.”

Sachs will advise the U.N. and specifically the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), the organization that coordinates different U.N. departments’ efforts on the Millenium goals. He will organize worldwide research efforts to see how the U.N. can best achieve those goals, U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq said.

Sachs’ current appointment is for one year, but he said that building and maintaining a network of researchers would probably be a multi-year effort.

Sachs said much of the project’s potential for success rests on the willingness of richer, industrialized nations like the United States to contribute to the initiatives the researchers propose.

“The very disconcerting problem has been that a lot of the rich world has really neglected the problems of the poor countries, so there’s no guarantee that the partnership for rich and poor will actually be put togehter,” he said.

Sachs previously chaired the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, which reported in December on how best to reduce disease in developing nations.

Although Sachs said the report was “well-received,” he said its finding that rich nations would need to significantly increase funding for health improvements in poorer countries had not been met with “adequate” response.

Sachs, who has recently been spending time in Washington, D.C. to convince American government officials to increase international aid, said he would spend about one day a week at U.N. headquarters in New York City. He will spend the remainder of his time doing research in Cambridge and traveling to Africa, India and China. He said Harvard students and faculty would likely help with his research.

Sachs organized over one hundred Harvard professors last spring in issuing a statement asking developed nations to give $1.1 billion to fight AIDS in Africa.

Last weekend, the CID joined with the UNDP and other organizations in launching the Global Digital Opportunity Initiative, a two-year effort to send information technology (IT) consultants and computer equipment to developing nations such as Mozambique.

Sachs said the project, which will analyze how IT is being used in developing nations, could lead to improvements in education and access to government documents and records.

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu