Pandemic makes tackling global woes more critical than ever: Bill Gates

Pandemic makes tackling global woes more critical than ever: Bill Gates The coronavirus pandemic has wiped out progress on lofty goals such as ending world poverty and hunger in the next decade, but the economic damage of COVID-19 shows how badly such global development is needed, philanthropist Bill Gates said. Ellen Wulfhorst U.S.

NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The coronavirus pandemic has wiped out progress on lofty goals such as ending world poverty and hunger in the next decade, but the economic damage of COVID-19 shows how badly such global development is needed, philanthropist Bill Gates said.

Across the world, the virus has deepened social and economic inequality in areas like education, pay and health care access, Gates said in remarks accompanying Monday’s release of a global development report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The report outlines ways in which COVID-19 has wreaked economic damage and derailed progress on many of the global development goals adopted by the United Nations five years ago.

“The COVID-19 pandemic not only stopped progress, it kicked it backward,” said Gates, who co-founded Microsoft Corp, in a conference call with reporters. He and his wife Melinda set up the philanthropic foundation in 2000.

U.N. members unanimously passed 17 Sustainable Development Goals, known as SDGs, in 2015, that read like a blueprint of ambitious tasks from ending hunger and gender inequality to expanding access to education and health care. The goals had a deadline of 2030.

“The SDGs represent the values that we have for humanity as a whole,” Gates said.

“The importance of the goals if anything is reinforced by the pandemic,” he said. “After all, the pandemic has in almost every dimension made inequity worse.”

The number of people living in extreme poverty had been dropping for two decades, but the coronavirus crisis has pushed nearly 37 million more into the category, the report said. ...

Also see:  https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/14/new-report-says-covid-19-pandemic-has-caused-historic-setbacks-in-global-health/