UNDP head: It's time for Equity and Justice

Time for equity and justice

By the Rt Hon Helen Clark, Co-Chair, MDG Achievement Fund and UNDP Administrator


Around the world, many people are articulating their disappointment with leaders and with governance and economic systems. A sense of disillusionment, anger,
and helplessness has prompted uprisings and/or protests from Wall Street to the Middle East.


The issues being raised are not new. We live in a very unequal world. Despite tremendous progress in many respects, extreme poverty persists. Estimates of global income inequality reveal that, as of 2007, the wealthiest 20 per cent of humankind enjoyed almost 83 per cent of total global income, while the poorest 20 per cent had just a single percentage point of that income.


At the current rate of improvement, it would take the poorest one billion people more than 800 years to access 10 per cent of global income (Ortiz & Cummins, 2011). The sheer magnitude of current inequalities serves as a call to action for a revised development framework that puts tackling poverty and promoting equity and social justice at its centre.


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Click to read the MDG-F's recent study on global inequalities: "Can the MDGs provide a pathway to social justice? The challenge of intersecting inequalities."