Veteran aid official named Director of UN Millennium Development Goals Campaign

A veteran official of aid and development programmes has been named to help lead the United Nations effort to promote action towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets agreed to by world leaders in 2000 aimed at halving global poverty, boosting children’s education and fighting diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, by 2015.

UN Development Programme (UNDP) Administrator Mark Malloch Brown recently announced the appointment of Salil Shetty of India as Director of the Millennium Development Goals Campaign. Mr. Shetty and his team will be working very closely with UNDP and the broader United Nations system to promote the Goals globally and secure increased participation not just from governments but civil society stakeholders.

Mr. Shetty will also work closely with and report to Eveline Herfkens, Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Executive Coordinator for the Campaign, who has been spearheading the Campaign’s efforts in the North to persuade donors to meet their commitments under Goal 8 in terms of aid, trade, debt relief and technology transfer to developing countries. Mr. Shetty is expected to focus in particular on helping the Campaign unit galvanize campaigns in the South by stimulating national political debate and harnessing existing national and regional networks and social movements in support of the Goals.

Mr. Shetty joins the Millennium Campaign from Action Aid, an international development non-governmental organization firmly committed to working with poor and marginalized people to eradicate poverty, where he was most recently Chief Executive and played a leading role in more than 30 programmes in Africa, Asia and across other regions.