Ban to visit Jamaica to participate in Caribbean regional summit

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will travel to Jamaica this weekend to attend a Caribbean summit and discuss regional efforts to try to achieve the social and economic targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the United Nations announced today.

The Thirty-First Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community, which is also known as CARICOM, is slated to begin in Montego Bay on Sunday.

Mr. Ban is expected to tell participants that the international community must act in concert in dealing with the impact of the global economic crisis, particularly its effects on the world’s most vulnerable.

He will also discuss the MDGs, which have a target date of 2015, and the need for Caribbean countries to accelerate progress towards the goals, which include slashing poverty, improving maternal health, fighting environmental degradation and boosting school attendance rates.

In September the UN chief is hosting a high-level event at UN Headquarters in New York that is aimed at charting the progress so far towards the MDGs and determining where attention and resources should be devoted between now and 2015.

In his address to the CARICOM gathering, Mr. Ban is also set to discuss UN efforts to support Haiti in the aftermath of January’s catastrophic earthquake, which killed more than 200,000 people and left at least one million others homeless.

While visiting Jamaica Mr. Ban will also have bilateral meetings with various heads of Government from the Caribbean as well as representatives of regional organizations.