NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, February 14, 2013

U.S. President Barack Obama vowed to empower women, advance economic opportunity and eradicate extreme poverty around the world within two decades in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

In a Feb. 12 speech focused on improving the lot of the U.S. middle class, Obama also vowed to help stabilize countries such as Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Mali, and help to spread democracy from the Middle East to South-East Asia.

Obama’s call for the eradication of extreme poverty comes at a time when global leaders are debating followup targets to the Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015 and called for the halving of extreme poverty by then. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and others have been pushing for a global commitment to “get to zero” poverty, and this was Obama’s most public acknowledgement yet of his intention to support the effort.