People are clearly the region's most abundant and most valuable resource.
Such development, however, is a multi-dimensional process encompassing not only policies to end poverty, unemployment and discrimination but measures to improve food and nutrition, health care, education, safe drinking water and sanitation, shelter, security, distributive justice and the people's ability and freedom to participate in society. They have come to take stock of their progress and to see if economic prosperity has also brought about social good. Specifically, they will look back to goals they set forth three years before, at a regional meeting held in 1994, before the landmark 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, Denmark. Enshrined in that Regional Social Development Agenda were a series of specific goals, in the areas of population, health, education, employment, shelter, environment, disasters, crime, social protection and the family, that governments pledged to attain in order to advance the cause of social development. One of these is the eradication of absolute poverty in the region by 2010.