UN General Assembly
2003

extreme poverty and deprivation. Clearly, therefore, the implementation of the Millennium Declaration is a race against time. Failure to act now, and to do so with a sense of urgency, will mean that we, especially the rich of this world, have failed to rise to the moral and political challenge, which is to protect that most sacred of all human rights, the right to life. Namibia is fully committed to the implementation of the Millennium Declaration. To this end, we allocate 23 per cent of our annual national budget to education and 15 per cent to health. In this commitment to invest in our people, we have proceeded from the premise that a fundamental way to address the problem of poverty is to improve the productive competitiveness of our economy, and that improving that competitiveness is dependant on the rapid increase in the knowledge, skills and capacities of the people, with a view to empowering them to be able to escape from the trap of poverty. Skills in the field of information technology