UN chief Ban Ki-moon named a high-profile committee Wednesday aimed at sparking progress against poverty and toward improved welfare under the organization's Millennium Development Goals.
The group will be led by co-chairs President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain.
Others in the group include Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, CNN founder Ted Turner and Jeffrey Sachs of The Earth Institute and a professor at Columbia University.
Ban said "distinguished" personalities from China, India, Japan and Britain will also join the panel.
"As you can see, (this is) a real collection of superheroes in defeating poverty," the UN secretary general said.
The group will push for progress in the Millennium goals stemming from a 2000 summit, which call for reducing extreme poverty by half by 2015.
The MDG Advocacy Group will bring together "some of the world's leading thinkers and doers," Ban added as the UN prepared for a new summit in September.
"We need to emerge from the September Millennium Development Goals Summit with concrete national action plans for realizing the goals," he said.
"These advocates can help get us there. They will help generate political will and mobilize a global grassroots movement to meet the MDGs."
The UN set a 15-year timeframe at the turn of the millennium to achieve its goals of halving extreme poverty, boosting health and education and further empowering women across the developing world.
Ban's announcement was made as the UN released a report showing choppy and uneven progress in reducing poverty.
According to the report, the proportion of people living on less than 1.25 dollars a day in developing nations has dropped from 46 percent in 1990 to 27 percent in 2005, largely due to improvements in China and other nations in Asia.
The figure is expected to drop to 15 percent by the target year of 2015.
The report also cites big gains in getting children into primary schools in many poor countries, especially in Africa. It also cites "strong interventions in addressing AIDS, malaria and child health" and "a good chance to reach the target for access to clean drinking water."
But the report also found that only half of the developing world's population has access to improved sanitation, such as toilets or latrines and that girls in the poorest quintile of households are 3.5 times more likely to be out of school than those from the richest households, and four times more likely than boys from this background.
Less than half of the women in some developing regions have access to maternal care by skilled medical personnel when giving birth, the report said.
Overall, the UN said the world economic crisis "took a heavy toll on jobs and incomes around the world," but does not threaten achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.
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