Millennium Challenges for Faith and Development: New Partnerships to Reduce Poverty and Strengthen Conservation

Let me thank you, [Trinity College] President McGuire, and you, Sheila Cast, Clark Lobenstein, and Richard Snowdon for the opportunity of joining you in what was a remarkable celebration of faith, and a recommitment to the things that I think all of us, from whatever religion, care about, a sense of justice, a sense of equity and a sense of hope for people in our community in Washington and throughout the world.

As President of the World Bank I have a distinct challenge, which is to work with developing countries, 5 billion people out of the 6 billion on our planet, who inhabit those countries that are in development.  But it does not stop me or my colleagues in the Bank from recognizing that we are working in a community here in Washington that is diverse and which itself has needs almost as various as the needs that we serve internationally.

So tonight it is a special pleasure to know that as we join together, we're thinking not just of the metropolitan community, not just of the global community, but a single community of humanity which exists on our planet and which shares similar hopes and aspirations wherever people find themselves.

We did a study of 60,000 poor people in 60 countries, and the not-surprising result of that survey was that people who live in poverty  have the same hopes and aspirations of those of us here who do not live in poverty.  They want a chance to live in peace.  They want a chance to have hope for their children.  They want their children to be educated.  The women do not want to be beaten.  They want an opportunity.  They're not looking for charity.  They're looking for opportunity.  They're looking for a chance, and they're not begging for help.  They're looking for an opportunity to develop themselves.  This was the result of our study, in many languages, in many parts of the world.

This is true also in our own community here in Washington, where we see the problems of poverty, where we see the problems of men and women with aspirations to fulfill their lives in dignity and hope, and where organizations such as those that come together in the Interfaith Conference are so important in giving them opportunity.

I'm very proud that my own organization, the World Bank, is participating in this community in ways that I think are very constructive, and I'm very happy that we're doing it in a number of cases with the faith-based communities.

We take people from drug rehabilitation and place them in jobs elsewhere in the community, and we've now expanded that same proposition to Egypt, and more recently to Russia, and we look forward soon to do it in the Ukraine and Philippines, taking people that are disadvantaged, the drug abusers, orphans, or people that just have had a rough time, and giving them an opportunity, an opportunity so often linked with faith that we all represent here tonight.

But my purpose was set as talking about the Millennium Challenges for Faith and Development, a New Partnership to Reduce Poverty and Strengthen Conservation.  I am very happy that Martin Palmer, my colleague from the United Kingdom is here tonight, who himself has led the way in linking faith-based communities with the causes of the environment and conservation.

What are the challenges that we're facing?  We have on our planet of 6 billion, close to 3 billion people that live under $2 a day.  We have 1.2 billion people that live under $1 a day.  We have a billion and a half people that don't have access to clean water.  We have 3 billion people that do not have access to sanitation.  We have 130 million children that are not in school, and we have rates of infant and maternal mortality in some countries that are hundred times the rate in this country.

And so at the Millennium Assembly of Global Leaders, the global leaders met and they said, let's look at what these Millennium Challenges are to which I've been asked to speak.  And they concluded that the Millennium Challenges were not issues of money or growth, which they could easily have addressed, but that the Millennium Challenges for our planet were to give a sense of equity and justice to people throughout the world.

The first challenge was to halve the percentage of people in poverty by the year 2015.  Subsequent challenges which they set related to halving infant mortality, halving maternal mortality, to get all children into school, and to protect our environment including the seas as well as the air.  These were the high-flown statements that were made by nearly 200 leaders of countries throughout the world, setting these as the objectives, and saying that without these objectives there could be no social justice, there could be no peace.

Following that, in Monterrey, Mexico, and in Johannesburg, South Africa, the rich and the poor countries came together to look at the question of how these objectives could be achieved.  The rich countries said, "We will help.  We will help by building capacity, we will help by opening our markets for trade, and we will increase the level of aid that we give to developing countries."  And the developing countries, for their part, said, "We must fulfill our side of the bargain.  We must strengthen our capacity in government, we must protect rights by including a review of our legal systems and justice systems.  We must address the  transparency of our financial systems, and we must combat corruption."

This was the bargain that was entered with great hope on the part of both sides of the spectrum of developed and developing countries.

Then a new dimension came on September the 11th, when the world discovered that there was no wall separating the rich and the poor countries, when there was a visual image of the imaginary wall between the rich and poor coming down, as the World Trade Center collapsed and as we saw the walls of the Pentagon collapsing on its eastern side.

For anyone who thought that the issues of poverty or the issues of development were outside this wall, that day made people recognize that the two worlds were joined together, and that globalization in the broader sense – the linkages by health, by environment, by crime, by drugs, by trade, by finance, by migration, by almost any dimension you could think of -- meant that we were linked together in an inevitable way.  For those who thought about it, it made people realize that, in fact, the issue of poverty somewhere had an impact on poverty everywhere.

Many of the leaders here tonight, including the President of this college, have talked to me about how we can conserve and develop the broader community internationally, not as a matter of charity but as a matter of what is right, as a matter of understanding that justice cannot be confined behind a wall, but that justice applies to humanity in general.

So the objective of our institution and those that work in the development field with us is to try and address the challenges facing this global community, the challenges that are addressed in the community, the need for education, for health, for poverty, for housing, all those things that this group IFC addresses.

But for us the level is more acute and the numbers are enormous, with a 1.2 billion people living under $350 in income per year.  We also find that women are hugely disadvantaged in this world and that we have to address the questions of the rights of women as an essential element in the whole development paradigm.

Now, why was I so keen to come to address this group tonight?  Because the issue is not just one of money, but let me say parenthetically that even on the issue of money, we're not doing very well.  The amount of money that is provided in development assistance today to the developing world from the rich world is on the order of $50 billion a year.  That sounds like a lot of money, except that it is 0.2 percent of the income of the rich countries.

How does it compare with other expenditures? On the question of opening our markets for trade, we compare that with $350 billion spent by the rich countries in subsidizing production of food.  And it compares with $900 billion spent on military expenditures.

I said the other day if we could spend $900 billion on development we'd probably only need $50 billion for defense.

[Laughter.]

The point remains the same, that we've just got this issue of balance in achieving these goals wrong, and there really is a need for something that will change the direction, change the commitment, change the belief of those in leadership positions to address in a pragmatic and effective way the challenge that poverty presents us.  It's a challenge that is right.  It's also a challenge that is in our self interest.

So this is the framework in which we are operating.  But because I thought there was something missing, some years ago with the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, and with his Highness the Aga Khan, we put together a group called the World Faith and Development Dialogue, and we have now met three times.  I see people in this room who have attended these meetings in Canterbury, and before that in Washington, and the first meeting at Lambeth Palace in England.

The idea of that was to do some of the things that are being done by IFC here in Washington, but to extend it to our world, to these 5 billion people.  It would say to the communities of faith and to say to the international development institutions, "You're addressing the same questions of development, but you don't talk to each other."  So George Carey and I and the Aga Khan, called this conference to try and see whether it would be possible to have the development institutions and the faiths come together in a way that would be constructive in dealing with the question of poverty.

To my surprise, the first thing that we learned was that the faiths didn't talk to each other in most of the countries that we were operating.  That came as something of a surprise to me, that there was no exchange of information, or very little, and indeed, there was quite often some hostility.  The only thing that unified them was hostility toward the World Bank.

[Laughter.]

But that was a unifying factor.  So we did manage to get them together basically to complain about us.  But it was an effective mechanism because the possibility of confronting me and my colleagues and telling us what they thought of us was irresistible to many of the leaders of the faiths.

[Laughter.]

So we brought them together, if albeit for a motive that I didn't enjoy, but nonetheless an opportunity for dialogue.

What came out of these meetings was the possibility now of having quite a number of very practical initiatives that relate particularly to AIDS, particularly to education, particularly to health.  How could one think of addressing the questions of education and health in sub-Saharan Africa, with 47 countries and nearly 600 million people, without talking to the faiths that account for about half the education and half the health care in the continent of Africa?  Yet this was going on.  There was no contact.

Now we have the beginnings of this contact, and indeed some 15 separate projects which were written up covering everything from health to education to AIDS to community-based development in countries as various as the African states to Central Asia.

I well remember being in Mongolia with Martin Palmer and my wife, Elaine, as we went into a temple where we consecrated the mountains in that wonderful country, and where the faiths are being used to develop the notion of environmental protection.  In Martin's excellent book on this subject there are many other examples, starting in Lebanon.  I want you to see, Martin, that I've actually read the book, and I would commend it to you.

But this issue of bringing the faiths together with the cause of humanity and the environment is something that is not just a dream.  I suggest to you today it is something that must happen, because as we see the conflict in our world, as we see the lack of commitment to development, as we recognize that funding is not forthcoming, as we recognize that in country after country in the rich world the preoccupations are with domestic issues, with budget deficits, with defense, and the international issues are confined to Iraq, Afghanistan, and terrorism, we find that the focus on this monumental body of humanity is being pushed behind us.

If it were a static situation, you might say, "Well, it will gradually improve."  But the situation is not static.  In the next 25 years, our world grows from 6 billion to 8 billion, and all but 50 million people go to developing countries, so that the world of our children in the year 2030 is going to be a world of 8 billion people, of which 7 billion are in developing countries.

This reality is inevitable, but the understanding of the impact is neither appreciated nor understood.  The human dimension, in terms of what should motivate us, is not going to come just from the financial analysis that the developing world is going to be growing at twice the rate of the rich world, and that in the year 2050, 40 percent of the world's earnings will come from developing countries.It's possible to make an economic case, but there needs to be something else.  There needs to be something greater than leadership based on economics or leadership based on military power.

In our country, United States, there is a need to project ourselves as not just the richest country in the world or the most powerful country in the world, but the country that stands for morality, for ethics, for faith, for equity, for justice, for spirituality.  There's a need for a greater dream.  There's a need for something higher, and I say this not just as President of the World Bank or as a pragmatist, I say it as a human being.  There's a need somehow to gain the inner strength to be able to say that our country and that the wealthy countries have an obligation which transcends economics and which deals with the essence of humanity and what is right.  What better place to start than with the faiths?

Sadly, some of the faiths let us down.  Extremism in many faiths locks out the real essence of those faiths.  But what is essential is that we get to the core of what was represented tonight, a core of coming together, a core of caring, a core of belief, a recommitment to justice, a recommitment to what is right in all our faiths, which is a recognition that the individual matters and that it is our function to care about brothers and sisters and to give them hope, and to give them opportunity.  This is at the core of most of our faiths.  It is not something that is a distant quest, it's something that can start with each of us, and each of us can stand out in front of others and change the direction of the way our world is going.

I again commend IFC for what it is doing in this community, a community in which the Bank is happy and proud to participate.  But I also say to you that our community is a global community, that our community cannot be safe, our hopes and aspirations cannot be satisfied, and our faiths cannot be fulfilled unless we come together to try and make the world a better place.