UN General Assembly
2015

The aftershocks and repercussions of the global economic and financial crisis continue to convulse developing nations. The crisis casts a shadow on our collective efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and shrouds our newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals in uncertainty. The measure of our recovery is not the health of corporations or the rate of jobless economic growth, but the ways in which we have reformed our financial architecture and the reordering of priorities that places people and the alleviation of poverty at the centre of our developmental discourse. The late United States President John F. Kennedy once said that if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. The fortress of wealth is not impregnable to the growing unrest and instability born of crushing poverty. Our failure to address and assault global poverty in this era of excess and innovation stands as the most stinging rebuke to our existing system of crass commercialism and unfettered corporate profiteering.