By Polly Ghazi Freelance writer and former environment correspondent for The Observer, based in Washington D.C.

Q: How important to achieving the Millennium Development Goals are the recent announcements from the EU on increasing aid budgets and the G8 on writing off debt owed by 19 of the world’s poorest countries?

A: These are major positive steps in that they put aid and debt firmly back on the international agenda. They represent the first big push forward, especially since both the EU and G8 have said the money pledged shall be additional to existing aid. Half the EU countries have at long last committed to the 0.7% of GDP aid target and to specific interim targets. However, we argue that debt relief must be expanded to wherever the MDGs are at risk, which some estimates suggest may be as many as 62 countries.

Q: What additional progress and commitments do you expect from the G8 summit?

A: We are hopeful that there will be a wider announcement on debt relief and on Gordon Brown’s proposed International Finance Facility [enabling governments to borrow money to spend immediately on aid or debt relief and pay it back over time]. How successful the IFF is depends on how many countries join. The United States and Japan may soften their opposition by supporting financing for specific initiatives such as immunisation programmes. On aid, we hope that those countries that are prevaricating will finally make some firm commitments.

Q: What is on the agenda for the September UN summit in New York which will review progress on the Millennium Development Goals? Is there a danger of losing momentum after the G8 meeting?

The goals for the UN summit are even larger than those for the G8. Clearly debt cancellation and more aid alone will not solve poverty. We are looking for a whole series of commitments, laid out in Kofi Annan’s recently published five year progress report on the Millennium Declaration.

From poor countries, we want commitments to adopt, by 2006, a comprehensive, well-resourced national strategy to achieve the MDGs by 2015. We are also looking for commitments to improve governance, uphold the rule of law, combat corruption and include civil society in development initiatives. We also want commitments from rich countries towards more just trade rules and to move ahead with the Doha Development Round in favour of poor farmers in poor countries.

Already more than 100 Heads of State have confirmed their attendance at the summit, so we don’t see any danger of a loss of momentum or political engagement. The UN is after all the legitimate space for all countries of the world to make decisions and hold each other to account on the commitments made in the Millennium Declaration.

Q: Following these two major summits, how can the Millennium Campaign sustain action on the MDGs up to 2015?

With a few exceptions, the civil society anti-poverty movement, most donors and we at the UN are looking to the long haul, towards 2015. In 2005-6, I think the world needs to sort out aid levels and financing, debt relief and trade reform. This will go a long way towards meeting Goal 8 [Develop a Global Partnership for Development]. From 2006-2015, the attention will shift to delivering goals one to seven on the ground – implementing the commitments extracted in 2005.

Alliances between the UN, NGOs, grassroots organisations and the media will continue to be crucial. MTV in Italy, for example, just made a ten year commitment to work with us. But you can’t expect to achieve the same level of publicity and movement every month that we’ve seen recently in relation to Africa and the G8.

Q: Away from the corridors of power, what are grassroots attitudes towards the MDGs in developing countries?

If you mean have many people in developing countries heard of the MDGs, the answer is very few. But if you go to any poor village in Africa and ask them what their priorities are, they say what the goals say. The real question is ‘do developing country governments take their MDG commitments seriously?’ Although Vietnam, Brazil, Thailand and some African countries have already defined national development goals which go a long way in meeting the MDGs, in general we need a massive scaling up of both effort and political will from poor countries. I would like to see accountability mechanisms for delivering MDG commitments to be a priority for discussion at the September summit.