Millennium Development Goals Keynote Panel
Dr. John W. McArthur, CEO of Millennium Promise and Anita Sharma, North American Coordinator for UN Millennium Campaign
3 to 4:30 PM Tuesday, October 13th
Dr. John W. McArthur
John W. McArthur is the Chief Executive Officer of Millennium Promise, the only international non-profit organization solely committed to supporting the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to halve extreme poverty by 2015. In this capacity he oversees the Millennium Villages project, which supports integrated social and business development services for more than 400,000 people in rural communities across 10 countries in Africa. Mr. McArthur is also a Research Associate at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he previously served as Policy Director, and teaches at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.
In 2007 and 2008 he co-chaired the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice, an initiative sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation to identify the cross-disciplinary training requirements for the next generation of sustainable development practitioners. He now co-chairs the International Advisory Board of the ongoing effort to launch a new global network of graduate degree programs. Previously, Mr. McArthur served as Deputy Director and Manager of the UN Millennium Project. In that role he coordinated a global network of nearly 300 experts who served on ten thematic Task Forces, oversaw a policy team that provided integrated technical advice to governments in low-income countries around the world, and served as lead editor of the Project's final report to the UN Secretary-General, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
Prior to that Mr. McArthur was a Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University, where he co-authored the Global Competitiveness Report with Michael Porter and Jeffrey Sachs. Mr. McArthur has an MPhil in Economics from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar; a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government; and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of British Columbia. He was recently recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader.
Anita Sharma
Anita Sharma has more than a decade's worth of experience working on issues related to U.S. foreign policy, and in particular development assistance, humanitarian response and conflict prevention.
Based in Washington, D.C., Sharma is currently the North American coordinator for the United Nations Millennium Campaign. In this capacity she engages with civil society, government leaders, the private sector, faith groups, and individuals in an effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
Sharma was previously the executive director of ENOUGH, an initiative of the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group to abolish genocide and mass atrocities. She also served as governance advisor in Indonesia with the Office of the United Nations Recovery Coordinator and has held international posts in Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan and Kosovo with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe.
In the United States, she directed the Conflict Prevention Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has also worked as research director for the Role of American Military Power Project and the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and holds a bachelor's degree with honors from Syracuse University and a master's degree from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.