Johannesburg - 6 May 2000
Ladies and Gentlemen
Graca and I are proud to be here today with our esteemed friend Carol Bellamy the Executive Director of the United Nations Children Fund to announce our commitment to work closely with her and her respected organization on a cause we hold most dear to our hearts - the rights of the children and adolescents of this world to live safe from violence and exploitation free of poverty and discrimination and to grow healthy and strong.
Here in my beloved country where people once divided by apartheid now work together in the name of justice Graca and I pledge our energies to building a global partnership for children of leaders from every sector and every calling who share a dogged determination to change the way the world sees our children and the way the world treats our children.
Our purpose is to get specific commitments from these leaders and specific results.
We will be insistent gracious yes but unyielding as we make phone calls write letters provide consultations and make speeches on behalf of children - pressing a wide circle of leaders from business civil society and governments to rethink what they do every day to better the lives of children. And whatever it is they do today we will coax them to do more tomorrow.
We will urge these leaders to take their turn in reaching out to a wider circle still inviting cajoling carrying each other along in an unprecedented international movement a collective global force that will herald the rights of children and act to ensure them.
This global partnership will be guided in its work by the Convention on the Rights of the Child that luminous living document that enshrines the rights of every child without exception to a life of dignity and self-fulfilment.
We are not seeking nor will we accept vague promises. We will challenge enlightened government leaders to join us and turn their words into deeds, enforce the laws enact the policies and search out the excluded children - the girl child the poor child the one little one with disabilities the one from the wrong tribe wrong caste - and find the ways to embrace them.
We will ask innovators in the business world to put their unique abilities to work for children. Use distribution networks that deliver cola drinks to the most remote towns and get textbooks and vaccines there first. Share profits share talent share advertising space - all in the name of children.
We will call upon leaders in academia the media and other sectors to join with us to ensure that the world honours its obligation to children. Be ever vigilant hold governments accountable struggle for peace and justice. Do not let up for a moment for there is no circumstance in which the neglect or abuse of children can ever be tolerated.
And to all who would be leaders we will issue the challenge that if met will speak louder than any document, reach out to children and adolescents themselves involve them engage them and listen to what they have to say. Make certain that the global partnership for children includes children.
This new partnership for children builds on the promises made nearly a decade ago at the World Summit for Children when national leaders from every part of the world made a solemn commitment to ensure the well-being of al societies by giving high priority to the rights of children to their survival and to their development. Those leaders pledged to act together in international cooperation as well as in their respective countries to enhance child health and pre-natal care to promote optimal child growth and development's to work toward strengthening the role and status of women's and to mount a global attack on poverty.
In the ensuing years some objectives - but far from all - of that noble agenda have come to pass.
Now at the dawn of the 21st Century we have a unique opportunity to fulfil the remaining commitments of the World Summit for Children - while simultaneously tackling new and emerging problems including poverty HIV/AIDS and the scourge of armed conflict.
In this world in which we have the means to cure many of the cancers that only a decade ago were considered lethal surely we are able to vaccinate all children against child killing diseases. In this world of such abundance surely we can find the means to assure that no child will go hungry no pregnant woman will be too weak to survive childbirth and that every one of the nearly 6 million children who will die next year because of malnutrition will be saved.
Surely in a world where communication technologies let some children exchange messages across oceans in seconds we can provide every child with a basic education of the very best quality. In this world of such invention there can be no excuse for not ensuring that all our children will have the knowledge and skills for success and the capabilities to work with others reach their full potential and transform their society.
Surely when children and adolescents in every part of the world can name their favourite soft drink running shoe or sports we are able to ensure that they will have access to the information they need to stay healthy. In a world that so often decries the apathy of its youth we can open our arms for the millions of adolescents eager to contribute their new ideas and bounding enthusiasm. And surely we can stand by the commitments that nearly every government in the world has made to children in signing the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Governments remain the primary actors in addressing such challenges - and indeed in playing a leading role in all development cooperation while involving the poor and the young themselves as full participants.
But now amid growing economic interdependence among nations we see a new global reality with additional protagonists including non-governmental organisations grassroots groups private enterprise the business community and other diverse elements of civil society.
These new actors possess both the knowledge and the resources to make a difference. Thus their involvement in a global partnership for children is not only desirable - it is vital. The task before us is to bring them together.
But time is short - for if we do not act now in concert the brushfire crises that are proliferating around the world may yet become an uncontrollable conflagration.
Graca and I hope that we can act as catalysts helping to persuade leaders of government and civil society at every level to recognise that if we want a more just equitable and thriving world we need to invest in children now.
This must include efforts that take full account of the immense peril that HIV/AIDS and armed conflict poses to every aspect of child survival - and the recognition that global poverty which has already consigned some 3 billion people to living on less than $2 a day - half of them children - is not only a moral outrage but a profound political and economic threat to the whole world. The knowledge the resources and the strategies all exist to make this a better world for all children - and Graca and I are convinced that if we start now we can build a truly global alliance to bring it about.
To dear Ms. Bellamy to UNICEF and to the children of the world we say, you have our word to help.
To our friends and colleagues we say, expect our call. To you here today who have afforded us your kind attention, thank you.
Issued by: UNICEF