I think I'm here more in my role as a former journalist to try and synthesize some of the fascinating points made this evening. There are a lot of common points - you have heard the different elements of the public-private partnerships directed at this great dead weight at the bottom of global society - poverty. Today 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day and almost half the world's population lives on less than two dollars a day.

Those of us who are alumni of earlier Universities for a Night will remember Michel Camdessus of the IMF and Jim Wolfensohn of the World Bank stressing lumpen poverty at the bottom of global society as something that must be changed. In some ways, it's gotten worse in that whereas the ratio of wealth between the bottom

20% of the world's population and the top 20% was 30 to one in 1960, that ratio had increased to 74 to one by 1997. Inequality, by some measures, is growing.

But I'm more of an optimist than my colleagues at the Bretton Woods institutions. This optimism is because in other senses, we are at a moment of extraordinary opportunity. We're going through a revolution. And revolutions that count demonstrate to historians that two sets of factors came together at once - intense technological innovation combined with dramatic social, economic and political change.

The example often given is that the printing press existed in China for a long time and was not much used until when Guttenberg "re-invented" it at the time of dramatic upheaval in Europe. People in an intense battle for ideas seized hold of it as a way of disseminating those ideas. You need innovation plus social and economic upheaval.

We have those circumstances in the world today. Since the mid-1980's the majority of humankind has moved from living in closed political systems to open, competitive, at least semi-democratic, political systems. The overwhelming majority have moved from closed economies into open market economies. It is a situation of turbulence, turmoil and competition, not just in the societies in the West, but also in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. In that context, there are breakthroughs in information technology, in medicine, in finance and in biotechnology.

Each of these changes alone could lead to dramatic changes in the well being of people. Put them together and you have a recipe for real revolution. The issue is how do we ensure that technological changes reach the poor and become levers for them to change their life.

If we look at the Internet we see problems. For example, 9% of the world's population lives in sub-Saharan Africa, yet only 0.1% of connectivity to the Internet is there.

In medicine, of the more than 1,200 drugs licensed world-wide over the last 30 years, only about 13 were for tropical diseases, and only four of those were produced by private companies. Drug development still is drugs for rich people's illnesses in the West, predominantly. For example, malaria took more than a million lives last year and costs African economies $2 million a year to address. But there's only $80 million a year in research funding to develop new malaria drugs.

New partnerships are needed to overcome these problems. I am concerned about governments, corporations and international organizations that remain as isolated beacons thinking that they can work in the old ways, rather than through new partnerships and new approaches.

Successful governments are not those defending their old privileges and hiding behind trade protectionism or trying to sustain large loss-making public sector industries. They are those which really focus on delivering education and health care in an environment of rule of law. They do it through innovative approaches, such as partnerships with civil society and the delivery of services by non-traditional methods. International organizations face the same challenge of renewal.

Corporations will too. The beginning globalization revolution is relatively good for corporations, because trade barriers are coming down and markets are expanding. But unless corporations face the challenge of adaptation and change, they'll be like governments or international organizations that don't change - dinosaurs.

In sector after sector technologies offer the prospect of transformation to developing countries, but they're not quite connecting, they're not reaching far enough into these new markets. So, for an organization like UNDP which has 132 offices around the world and is a connector and a facilitator, the real challenge isn't how do we drum up more ODA from tight-fisted governments.

Instead is it how do we capture the power of the ideas expressed here tonight and connect them to the poor in developing countries. This certainly means reaching the goal of universal Internet access for kids all over the world. In Brazil and South Africa, which have very poor communities but overall middle income status, you're seeing this happening as computers and Internet access spreads. Concomitant with this is the need for universal primary education. 113 million children are today still not in school and many others are leaving long before they have adequate levels of literacy. At the same time the new knowledge economy which our children are going to live and compete in requires more than just basic literacy.

In medicine, you're seeing new partnerships between Bristol-Myers Squibb and other companies with the World Bank, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation and others to create incentives for research for drugs for poor people by guaranteeing markets to buy those drugs. And in biotechnology The Rockefeller Foundation, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research and others are looking for ways to create similar incentive structures with equally enlightened leaders from the private sector to insure that the benefits of these food breakthroughs reach the poor.

Two things have to happen. One is in response to the fact that democratic systems are an important but not sufficient step in achieving good development. We have to pursue a democratic revolution which goes beyond formal, national structures to really thorough democracy, such as Community Solidarity in Brazil, which aims to bring the poor into corporate and public decision making.

And the second is to ensure that at the international level we move beyond international organizations setting rules in isolation from the realities of the new global society to a much more issue-oriented approach in which civil society, the private sector and others promote issues which should be tackled at a global level and help to insure that the poor are included in the global economy that we are building. And not left outside the gates, angry, disillusioned fighting to get in.

The challenge is how to turn that opportunity into reality.

 
 

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