UN to announce aid for women and children

United Nations: Secretary General Ban Ki-moon plans to end a development summit meeting of world leaders on Wednesday by announcing a huge increase in aid to improve the health of women and children, but independent specialists said they were skeptical about the amount of actual new money committed, given the global economic crisis.

Governments and private aid organizations committed to spending more than $40 billion toward that goal, Robert Orr, the assistant secretary general leading the effort, said on Tuesday, and pledges were still flowing in.

The two lagging areas among the 15-year development goals that United Nations member states agreed to in 2000 are efforts to drastically cut the deaths of both young children and mothers in childbirth. The baseline to measure improvement is 1990.

Having money specifically directed at those two issues should help counteract "the hard stuff that has been the most resistant to change," Orr said.

The eight Millennium Development Goals, or M.D.G.'s in the United Nations' alphabet soup, included cutting by two-thirds the number of children who die before age 5 and reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015.

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Infant mortality has dropped to about 8.1 million annually from more than 12 million in 1990, while maternal mortality is down to about 350,000 from more than 500,000 -- improvements, but still short of the goals.

And the latest money committed will still not allow the world to meet the goals.

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United Nations officials said they hoped that the bulk of the $40 billion would go to the poorest 49 countries, those least able to afford money from their own budgets. But those countries alone need a projected $88 billion over the next five years to meet the goals.

Mr. Ban's announcement is also expected to include an ambitious commitment by the poorest countries to add nearly $26 billion to their health budgets.

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Aid groups remain skeptical that the traditional donors among Western nations will really increase their giving at a time when they are slashing budgets. In addition, experts say, any announced increases, like France and Norway pledging to increase by 20 percent previous commitments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, still fall short of the need.

"It has to be more than announcing amounts at a summit, it is about going home and putting that money in national budgets," said Emma Seery, a development specialist at Oxfam International, a global antipoverty organization. "I am not seeing where the money is coming from."

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The American ambassador, Susan E. Rice, said that no new American money would be committed beyond the $63 billion the United States set aside for global health aid through 2014, the bulk of it to combat AIDS.

At the development meeting on Tuesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that her country would not cut its aid budget, but she did not announce any increase.

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"The primary responsibility for development lies with the governments of the developing countries," she said. "Development aid cannot continue indefinitely."