A U.N. focus on poverty.

The poor you shall always have with you. Well, can we think about that? Last month's Copenhagen UN summit on social development called for a new moral consensus on poverty. Toward that end, a week-long global town meeting addressed the needs of the poor. Before listening to Mitterand, Mandela, Kohl, and some of the other 130 heads of state who spoke to the summit, I spent the week with ordinary people whose stories suggested real progress against the grinding poverty that grips one-fifth of the world's people.

Of course, delegates from 185 countries were in attendance. But in addition to the formal state delegations, more than twenty thousand volunteers came from local equivalents of United Way organizations in towns and villages across the world. I met with hundreds of grassroots organizers, microcredit officers, local entrepreneurs, transnational CEOs, journalists, jurists, teachers, and students from around the world. Perhaps more than anything else, Copenhagen was the nongovernmental organizations' [NGOs] summit. And in that sense, it was a global trade show, state fair, and town meeting. The wares on display were mainly ways to improve the quality of life from the grassroots up.

Copenhagen's was the fourth of six UN conferences to be held over a six-year period. Taken together, the meetings cover the curriculum for global change in the post-cold war world. The first conference, held in 1990 in New York, focused on the child. Then, in 1992, the Earth Summit convened in Rio. The Vatican made the third summit on population and development in Cairo a front-page story. Copenhagen's agenda was poverty, unemployment, and social disintegration. The Women's Conference, scheduled for September 1995 in Beijing, is already in preparation, while the Habitat Conference in Istanbul is in development for 1996.

The format for these international meetings usually entails official government delegations meeting alone or with each other each day. The delegations then meet in plenary sessions where the language of the summit document is negotiated. On the last two days of each conference, heads of state arrive. Each is given seven minutes to speak before the summit declaration is publicly ratified.

There seems to be some uncertainty about the purposes of the UN summits, especially in the press in the United States. At the height of the cold war, "summits" brought the U.S. and USSR together to sign treaties with very specific outcomes. But in the aftermath of the cold war, international summits can focus on social and economic issues, and, perhaps more important, allow leaders and citizens from all 185 UN states to come together to address common concerns and to develop a common vocabulary.

In this regard, modern communications technology is having a dramatic impact. The so-called rebels in Chiapas, for example, used a Powerbook to send stories out across the globe. Some of the Zapatistas spoke at the poverty summit. Connections made at these meetings can now easily be sustained across great distances. More important, governments are finding it more and more difficult to hide the real conditions of their peoples.

Because of the generous spirit of the Copenhagen organizer, Juan Somavia, Chile's ambassador to the UN, almost all the summit's business was open to members of NGOs. This marked a significant change in the relationship between the nongovernmental organizations and the formal UN structure which normally focuses on the needs of the state delegations, closing most meetings to nondelegates.

After a plenary group meeting of national delegations spent sixty-seven minutes arguing the merits of the wording "extreme poverty" vs. "abject poverty," I concluded I preferred NGO caucuses. At the NGOs' sessions solutions to problems were shared. I heard CAPE (Children's Alliance for Protection of the Environment) lay out problems and progress related to child labor in Kenya. The Legal Research and Resource Center for Human Rights discussed governmental and social obstacles facing Southern NGOs in achieving sustainable development. The Women's Caucus is a powerful force led by former Congresswoman Bella Abzug. The Values Caucus, the Peace Caucus, the Development Caucus, and others cross-pollinate stories and ideas and create new alliances, new friendships. University groups led daylong symposia. I attended one called "Reclaiming Civil Society in the Global South." I also attended "Rethinking Social Development," where Wole Soyinka, Rolf Dahrendorf, Amitai Etzione, and Johan Galtung, among others, examined the future of the nation-state, economic growth, and social cohesion. UNICEF, UNESCO, and other UN offices also held open forums, as did the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Mrs. Clinton addressed the summit on the importance of education for girls. The United States has committed $10 million to the education of girls in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Much more is needed. Enthusiasm greeted Al Gore's announcement that 40 percent of U.S. aid would be allocated to NGOs. Statistics suggest that over the past decades as much as a third of the foreign aid to the third world has been used for bribes or pocketed by unscrupulous leaders. A similar amount has gone for military expenditures, often fueling regional wars. While there are certainly some problems with NGO leadership, common sense and recent studies suggest that local groups can spend aid money more efficiently. Grants and loans as small as $50 to $100 can initiate substantial change. Data from India's Grameen Bank and from Women's World Banking show that often these grants are matched by funds saved by local people, thus paving the way from poverty to self-reliance. Default on these loans is less than 2 percent.

Over the last two hundred years, the moral consensus of the world community on slavery and torture has changed dramatically. Since the 1970s, a social conscience about pollution has also been developing. The voices I heard at Copenhagen, emphasizing working with the poor not for the poor, sounded as prophetic as those of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. I think the new millennium will be the time to rethink poverty, and the Copenhagen summit made it possible to hear the birth of a dramatic new moral consensus on that issue--not a big bang, but something more like quickening.