UNITED NATIONS, June 19 (Xinhua) – The poverty-focused photo contest co-hosted by Xinhua and UNDP is “very important” to the global anti-poverty drive, a senior UN official told Xinhua.
“The anti-poverty drive will get a lot of publicity by joining hands with Xinhua News Agency in the photo contest”, Helen Clark, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), said.
On May 27 in Beijing, the Chinese capital, China’s Xinhua News Agency and UNDP announced the launch of an international photo contest featuring the theme of global fight against poverty.
Titled with “Zoom-in on Poverty Global Photo Contest,” the event is co-organized by Xinhua and UNDP with an aim to raise awareness and win more support from people and governments across the world for poverty eradication, organizers said.
Photographers around the world, both amateur and professional, have been invited to submit works with anti-poverty themes from June 1 until Sept. 1, according to organizers. The contest will conclude on Oct. 17, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. An awarding ceremony will be held in Beijing on that day.
IMPORTANT PARTNERSHIP
“I think the partnership with Xinhua on the contest is very, very important because a photo always speaks more than a thousand words. Photographers, amateur and professional could bring a clear and strong message about the importance of fighting poverty,” Clark said.
The partnership with Xinhua is also important “because Xinhua is such a vast agency with so many languages, so many outlets, if Xinhua initiates an event, it will get a lot of publicity, so I think the photo contest is very important for the poverty fighting cause,” she said.
This is the third global humanitarian event that Xinhua has sponsored through cooperation with UN agencies over the past three years.
Xinhua co-organized a special report along with the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) last year to mark the World Food Day on Oct. 16.
On Nov. 20, 2009, Xinhua and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) jointly undertook a “Global News Day for Children,” a 24-hour news reporting campaign to mark the Universal Children's Day.
“Xinhua always speaks to such a huge audience -- both within and beyond China,” Clark said, adding that it's really important to the international agencies, like UNDP, UNICEF, and World Food Program to have this kind of partnership with Xinhua, as it is such an influential news media in the world.
Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand, became the administrator of the UNDP on April 17, 2009, and is the first woman to head the UN institution.
SUCCESSFUL EXPERIENCES FROM CHINA
“When I went to China for my first visit as administrator of UNDP in 2009, we were celebrating 30 years of UDNP coming to China,” Clark said.
The UNDP made its debut in China shortly after the country announced its drive to reform and open up to the outside world, “so UNDP was called on to help some of those planning and reform,” she said.
“We also gave some support as China got itself ready to join the World Trade Organization which was another very important initiative,” she said.
“The Chinese government asks us to support the country to tackle the remaining pockets of poverty because while China has lifted hundreds and hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, it wants to eradicate poverty by 2020 -- that's what the new five-year plan says, so we want to give every bit of support we can to China to design the programs for this end.”
“At UNDP, we think the lessons and experiences from China's hugely successful poverty reduction programs need to be known and shared widely,” she said.
According to UN reports, global progress on poverty reduction was largely due to the reduction of hunger in China. Since 1990, poverty, especially absolute poverty in rural areas, has been greatly reduced, according to the UNDP.
China has now achieved the target of halving the number of poor people from the 1990 figure of 85 million, and thus has realized the target of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty.
At the September 2000 Millennium Summit, leaders from all 191 UN members signed an agreement to commit themselves to combating poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women. They agreed to cut poverty in half by a deadline of 2015 from the 1990 level.
Known as the Millennium Declaration, the agreement included eight specific goals, such as eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary school education, reducing child mortality and ensuring environmental sustainability.
Some of the MDGs, including those on primary education, have already been achieved in China 13 years in advance. The mortality rate of children under five dropped from 61 per 1,000 births in 1991 to 25 in 2004. The maternal mortality ratio decreased from 89 per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 51.3 in 2003.
