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At the dawn of the 21st century, the international community, through the United Nations agreed on a set of priorities and targets that sought to mobilise national and global action to promote human development.

The adoption of the Millennium Declaration represented a historic global commitment by the international community and serves as a blueprint for development in key social and economic areas.

The international community committed itself to the Millennium Development Goals to eradicate extreme poverty; facilitate universal primary education; attain gender equality and the empowerment of women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; reduce the burden of disease through primarily combating HIV and AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis; protect the environment for present and future generations; and mobilize global partnerships for development by 2015.

With only five years remaining before 2015, world leaders will converge in New York from 20-22 September 2010 to review successes and agree on concrete actions to tackle the remaining challenges.

South Africa has just finalized its Third Country Report in consultation with a range of stakeholders including civil society groups. The report which is to be tabled with those of other countries at the UN MDG Review High Level Plenary Meeting clearly shows that our country is on a positive trajectory to achieve the MDG targets and inspires pride and confidence in ourselves. Of importance, is that the report also highlights areas where we are lagging behind.

The areas in which we have been most successful are in facilitating universal access to primary education, a target which we reached before 2015 deadline. This demonstrates that we are on track to achieve or even exceed this MDG target. What is more impressive with the achievement of this target is that the proportion of girls attending primary, secondary and tertiary education has improved significantly, with the participation of girls being one of the highest in the world.

The attainment of the MDG target on education is significant for a number of reasons. Education is central to development and can serve as a catalyst to address gender disparities. Moreover, education is the primary vehicle by which vulnerable children can lift themselves out of poverty and obtain the means to participate meaningfully in the economy. For this reason the South African government has taken a proactive stance to ensure that in addition to the attainment of the numerical targets, our investment in education is accompanied by a concomitant improvement in the quality educational outcomes.

Similarly, the report indicates that we have recorded impressive progress through the expansion of health infrastructure and improved access to health services for all South Africans. However the report cautions that the increased access to health services did not necessarily translate into better health outcomes. While we have best practice policies to enhance the health of children and women, our inherent health systems problems, exacerbated by the HIV and AIDS pandemic has resulted in persistently high mother and baby mortality rates.

Improving access to quality health-care services is therefore a key national priority and brings into stark relief, the need for a National Health Insurance scheme as proposed by the African National Congress. This will go a long way to eliminate the current health disparities in our country. However, we need to invest in more primary health facilities, because of the beneficial attributes of primary care.

We need to produce more doctors and other key health professionals and indeed work in partnership with civil society and public health professionals to promote a health services workforce dedicated to saving lives and providing excellent public health services.

In relation to MDG 1- eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, our progress has so far been mixed. We have reduced the numbers of people experiencing the worst levels of income poverty significantly, and have in fact achieved the MDG target of reducing the number of people living on less than one US dollar a day. Most of the achievements in reducing extreme levels of income poverty can be ascribed to government's comprehensive social protection programme, which includes extensive income support programmes, access to free education and primary health care for the poorest and the provision of free basic services to indigent members of our society.

MDG target 8 calls for concerted national action and highlights the importance of establishing partnerships for development. This is the area that needs the attention of all South Africans. As a society built on principles of democracy and social solidarity we need to ask ourselves: What do we need to build a society where more people can participate meaningfully through having access to decent jobs? As we discuss this we should not be wedded to ‘isms' or holy cows.

This includes letting go of notions that an unfettered free market approach or an overwhelmingly state-driven economy are the solutions. We need not look any further than the recent global recession to prove this point.

The MDGs represent the most determined national and global effort to galvanise action towards a shared common goals. They are about basic social and economic rights for all and at the heart of our development efforts. As South Africans and as members of the collective international community determined to eradicate poverty and hunger, we need to develop innovative means of dealing with these issues.

The African National Congress will be discussing these and other issues at its upcoming National General Council and later at its policy conference.

The discussion on the MDGs will be uppermost in our agenda. Although it is governments that signed the MDG Declaration and therefore bear primary responsibility for implementation, it is obvious that the goals are unlikely to be achieved without the active involvement of civil society and other critical stakeholders such as the academia and business sector.

I therefore hope that these critical partners in development will similarly discuss and work towards developing innovations that will ultimately help all of us make decisions that are in the interest of all South Africans. These discussions need to address the fact that while we are reducing absolute poverty, levels of inequality remain persistently high and still largely reflect a racial divide in our country.

The MDGs are therefore indeed, a clarion call to all sectors to work together to achieve a more equal society and to ensure a better life for all our people.

Working together we can do more!