Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps she plans to take to ensure that the UK makes a contribution to the post-2015 UN agenda on the Millennium Development Goals.

The MDGs have been an enormous success, helping to focus global attention on poverty and resulting in, for example, extreme poverty being halved, maternal deaths falling by 45% and the under-five deaths dropping from 12m a year to 6m a year.

The UK has made a significant contribution to these successes. For example, the UK has supported over 43 million people to access water, sanitation or hygiene interventions; and over 19 million children under 5 and pregnant women to access nutrition programmes. The UK’s binding commitment to 0.7% of GNI for official development assistance is solid evidence of the UK’s leadership on international development.

The UK continues to make a strong contribution to the ongoing negotiations in the United Nations to agree the post-2015 Development Agenda in advance of the post-2015 summit in September of this year, building on the Prime Minister’s co-chairing of the High Level Panel. The UK will play its full part in delivering the post-2015 agenda when it is launched in January 2016.