MDGs "will not be achieved by 2015 as agreed" - Paul Biya

The objectives of the Millennium Development Goals "will not be achieved by 2015 as agreed", according to the head of the Cameroonian State Paul Biya.

Speaking Monday in Yaounde, the capital of his country, at the opening of the 60th (APC) Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conference, he felt that "much progress still needs to be done in key areas".

While recognizing that significant advances had been recorded in some areas such as schooling, immunization coverage, the fight against HIV, malaria and the promotion of school, he noted that famine had not been eradicated, poverty receded too slowly, that unemployment, particularly among young people, remained a difficult problem and that health coverage remained inadequate.

In this discourse essentially dedicated to the MDGs the calendar which was adopted on 8 September 2000, Paul Biya has called its interlocutors, to "invent new strategies which can lead to a substantial improvement of the living conditions of the populations".

African countries, recalled the president of Cameroon, have developed a common position suggesting a harmonization of this Agenda with national and continental programmes of development, in full coherence with the 2063 Agenda of the African Union.

There for this purpose he invited the member countries of the Commonwealth to work to ensure that these commitments have a force of law.

Addressing the current international environment, marked by the persistence of many hotbeds of tension, and in the case of the Ebola epidemic fever, Mr. Biya relied on "a real threat which transgressed the boundaries of States.