“As he prepares to co-chair a session of the U.N. High-Level Panel on aid in New York on Tuesday,” U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron “is to launch an 11th-hour bid to save a major U.N. report on the future of international development amid fears among aid groups that it … [may] lose sight of its original goals,” The Guardian reports. “Speaking ahead of the meeting, Cameron said: ‘It is coming to the end of its work. I hope it is going to be a good piece of work. But I need to be there in order to nail down some simple clear commitments that everyone can get behind as we look to the successors to the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs],'” the newspaper writes, noting Cameron co-chairs the panel with the presidents of Liberia and Indonesia.

“Aid agencies have warned that a report being drawn up on behalf of Cameron and his two fellow co-chairs has been stripped of some of its main goals,” The Guardian writes. According to the newspaper, “a first draft of the report made no mention of Cameron’s aim of eradicating child death and hunger by 2030 and eradicating extreme poverty by the same year.” The Guardian continues, “The absence of a reference to ‘zero’ goals is important because aid agencies believe it is important not to lose momentum towards achieving some MDGs which will be missed in 2015 but where progress has been made. These are in the area of access to education, access to health and sanitation and child mortality” (Watt, 5/14).